Memory hog on Ubuntu 9.10

[Steffen Schaumburg]

On 04/04/10 18:24, Yang Zhang wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Julien Cristau <jcristau at debian.org> wrote:
>   
>> On Sun, Apr  4, 2010 at 04:34:06 -0400, Yang Zhang wrote:
>>
>>     
>>>         Driver  "nvidia"
>>>       
>> You'll have to talk to nvidia then.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Julien
>>
>>     
> Thanks Julien. Just out of curiosity, is this a well-known and
> widespread issue with nvidia systems? And is there any way for me to
> verify that it's indeed due to the nvidia driver via inspection
> (preferably without switching off nvidia drivers and waiting, since
> this issue usually takes a long time to reproduce)?
>   
I'm not aware of any widespread issue, and although I haven't got a
great deal of interest in the proprietary drivers I'm sure I would've
heard about it. As for verifying.. well, that's one of the key
criticisms of these illegal drivers. Since they are loaded into kernel
space they can do _whatever_ _they_ _want_ with your system - that's the
nature of kernel code. And since they're binary its not feasible to
figure out what exactly they're up to.

Your best bet is to either turn of that driver and use nv or nouveau
(maybe nouveau already satisfies your requirements, and unlike nvidia
it's actually supportable) for comparison, or to contact nvidia support.
Tho I wouldn't hold my breath on a useful reply from them, they made it
quite clear what priority non-workstation-users under non-windows have
for them. You could also try e.g. the Phoronix forums [1], I would
imagine they have a lot more nvidia users than this list. But I'd really
recommend you give nouveau a shot first.

Cheers, Steffen

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=20