PSA: It's Recommended To Avoid Using The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver (e.g. Nouveau) On Kernel 6.3
PSA: It's Recommended To Avoid Using The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver (e.g. Nouveau) On Kernel 6.3
It's recommended to avoid using the open-source NVIDIA 'Nouveau' graphics driver on the current stable Linux 6.3 series as there is a serious bug present that could cause varying issues to your system.
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There is a use-after-free issue within the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and it can cause corruption of kernel memory. Use-after-free issues are also a potential security vulnerability but it's possible this corrupted kernel memory could lead to file-system corruption or other system issues.
I am curious as to how many people are actually using the Nouveau driver. Chances are that if you care that much about not using a proprietary driver, you are not gonna buy a Nvidia card.
I think this would mostly only really impact a select few who are trying to do a fresh install with 6.3 kernel, as very few live discs use proprietary drivers during install (is it only PopOS that does that?). Even then most mainstream distros wouldn't have had live discs with 6.3 (Fedora 38 did not and I'm guessing all Debian based ones had an older kernel). Not sure about Arch and OpenSUSE tho
Anyway, the good news is that there's already a patch for this out with 6.4 so even those handful that would have been affected should be fine now: