5 ms·

Yeah, I remember reading that when it was first posted. Glad to see other people are aware, but it's disappointing nothing has been done. The fix is pretty sim

Yeah, I remember reading that when it was first posted. Glad to see other people are aware, but it's disappointing nothing has been done. The fix is pretty simple, the GPU manufacturer just needs to update their driver to zero the VRAM like an OS would with RAM.

cbd1984 11y ago
Are device drivers ever updated, much less for security issues? Seems like an obvious way to increase the take, in any event: "Chip X has a security flaw. Chip Y does not. Buy chip Y now or Evil People will own-zor all your cash-zors."
- floatboth 11y ago
  People who often play 3D games always update their graphics drivers :)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jsheard 11y ago
  > Are device drivers ever updated, much less for security issues? Yep, all the time. http://i.imgur.com/8k3ffLa.png http://i.imgur.com/8k3ffLa.png
- taspeotis 11y ago
  Since we're talking about GPUs... search the NVIDIA archive [1], and look for the WHQL drivers: Version: 359.00 - Release Date: Thu Nov 19, 2015 Version: 358.91 - Release Date: Mon Nov 09, 2015 Version: 358.87 - Release Date: Wed Nov 04, 2015 Version: 358.50 - Release Date: Wed Oct 07, 2015 [1] http://www.nvidia.com/drivers/beta http://www.nvidia.com/drivers/beta
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    So what about the BSODs that device drivers cause? Are those not device driver issues, but OS issues, or are they unfixable?
    - Fr0styMatt88 11y ago
      They could be any of those. In a sense, BSODs aren't anything special -- all a BSOD means is that some code running in kernel mode has crashed or raised some exception that went unhandled. The same thing, when it happens in a user-mode program, gets you the error dialog box 'Program has stopped working'. So the causes of BSODs and user application crashes are the same. The reason Windows has BSODs is that it's dangerous to keep the system going when something in kernel mode crashes. Things running in kernel mode have access to everything (think - all memory) and are deemed important enough to the operation of the whole system that a crash in one of those is a significant event that's worthy of special logging and rebooting. You can't guarantee, for example, that a display driver crash hasn't corrupted other parts of memory, cuasing potential for data loss if the system were to continue operating. So, back to the original point. Device-driver BSODs from the big vendors are probably rare enough in general that you should suspect a hardware problem or glitch if you suddenly see one out of the blue. Graphics drivers, given their complexity, are a bit more prone to crashing though. Also, things running on the system can interact and cause the driver to crash. Windows has lots of infrastructure in place for making sure device drivers behave safely. There's also good facilities for figuring out exactly what caused a BSOD beyond the usually cryptic-looking error code you see on the screen. Resplendence WhoCrashed is handy: http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed Though if you really want to dig deep, the tools with the Windows SDK (particularly WinDbg) can let you achieve the same thing; they are developer tools though, so targeted more to that audience. EDIT: Just to add in answer to your original comment, big-vendor graphics drivers are VERY often updated. I'd bet they're the most often updated drivers on a system. There are myriad reasons for this, both technical and competitive. That doesn't mean that long-standing problems are necessarily fixed, but both AMD and Nvidia have very regular releases with fixes and performance improvements.
      - tracker1 11y ago
emcq 11y ago
Or the window manager should zero things out? It seems more consistent for the OS to be responsible for this then say the driver which also does things like supporting OpenGL and GPGPU usecases.
- asdfaoeu 11y ago
  You can generally allocated GPU buffers without the window manager. So to be effective this would have to be in the kernel driver. Opengl/GPGPU is generally done in the user space driver so it'd still be separate.
- revelation 11y ago
  When graphics card vendors want to protect their competitive edge and not do OS integration beyond dropping horrible and opaque binary blobs every now and then, they'll also have to mop up the security issues such as this on their own. Technically this should be a OS responsibility, but practically the vendors have made that all but impossible.
exDM69 11y ago
> The fix is pretty simple, the GPU manufacturer just needs to update their driver to zero the VRAM You seem to be using OSX (judging by the screenshots). You should be aware that OSX's GPU drivers are written by Apple (or at least they act as the gatekeeper). You need to send the bug report to them. And perhaps update the title of your post to "Apple breaks..." I've seen this exact same behavior on OSX with an Intel GPU. As mentioned elsewhere in this post, e.g. Windows WDDM drivers require memory to be zeroed out.

cbd1984 11y ago

Are device drivers ever updated, much less for security issues? Seems like an obvious way to increase the take, in any event: "Chip X has a security flaw. Chip Y does not. Buy chip Y now or Evil People will own-zor all your cash-zors."

floatboth 11y ago
People who often play 3D games always update their graphics drivers :)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jsheard 11y ago
> Are device drivers ever updated, much less for security issues? Yep, all the time. http://i.imgur.com/8k3ffLa.png http://i.imgur.com/8k3ffLa.png
taspeotis 11y ago
Since we're talking about GPUs... search the NVIDIA archive [1], and look for the WHQL drivers: Version: 359.00 - Release Date: Thu Nov 19, 2015 Version: 358.91 - Release Date: Mon Nov 09, 2015 Version: 358.87 - Release Date: Wed Nov 04, 2015 Version: 358.50 - Release Date: Wed Oct 07, 2015 [1] http://www.nvidia.com/drivers/beta http://www.nvidia.com/drivers/beta
- cbd1984 11y ago
  So what about the BSODs that device drivers cause? Are those not device driver issues, but OS issues, or are they unfixable?
  - Fr0styMatt88 11y ago
    They could be any of those. In a sense, BSODs aren't anything special -- all a BSOD means is that some code running in kernel mode has crashed or raised some exception that went unhandled. The same thing, when it happens in a user-mode program, gets you the error dialog box 'Program has stopped working'. So the causes of BSODs and user application crashes are the same. The reason Windows has BSODs is that it's dangerous to keep the system going when something in kernel mode crashes. Things running in kernel mode have access to everything (think - all memory) and are deemed important enough to the operation of the whole system that a crash in one of those is a significant event that's worthy of special logging and rebooting. You can't guarantee, for example, that a display driver crash hasn't corrupted other parts of memory, cuasing potential for data loss if the system were to continue operating. So, back to the original point. Device-driver BSODs from the big vendors are probably rare enough in general that you should suspect a hardware problem or glitch if you suddenly see one out of the blue. Graphics drivers, given their complexity, are a bit more prone to crashing though. Also, things running on the system can interact and cause the driver to crash. Windows has lots of infrastructure in place for making sure device drivers behave safely. There's also good facilities for figuring out exactly what caused a BSOD beyond the usually cryptic-looking error code you see on the screen. Resplendence WhoCrashed is handy: http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed Though if you really want to dig deep, the tools with the Windows SDK (particularly WinDbg) can let you achieve the same thing; they are developer tools though, so targeted more to that audience. EDIT: Just to add in answer to your original comment, big-vendor graphics drivers are VERY often updated. I'd bet they're the most often updated drivers on a system. There are myriad reasons for this, both technical and competitive. That doesn't mean that long-standing problems are necessarily fixed, but both AMD and Nvidia have very regular releases with fixes and performance improvements.
    - tracker1 11y ago

emcq 11y ago

Or the window manager should zero things out? It seems more consistent for the OS to be responsible for this then say the driver which also does things like supporting OpenGL and GPGPU usecases.

asdfaoeu 11y ago
You can generally allocated GPU buffers without the window manager. So to be effective this would have to be in the kernel driver. Opengl/GPGPU is generally done in the user space driver so it'd still be separate.
revelation 11y ago
When graphics card vendors want to protect their competitive edge and not do OS integration beyond dropping horrible and opaque binary blobs every now and then, they'll also have to mop up the security issues such as this on their own. Technically this should be a OS responsibility, but practically the vendors have made that all but impossible.

exDM69 11y ago

> The fix is pretty simple, the GPU manufacturer just needs to update their driver to zero the VRAM You seem to be using OSX (judging by the screenshots). You should be aware that OSX's GPU drivers are written by Apple (or at least they act as the gatekeeper). You need to send the bug report to them. And perhaps update the title of your post to "Apple breaks..." I've seen this exact same behavior on OSX with an Intel GPU. As mentioned elsewhere in this post, e.g. Windows WDDM drivers require memory to be zeroed out.