NVIDIA Finds and Corrects Old Compiz Bug That Caused Windows to Go Black in Ubuntu

NVIDIA has fixed a long-standing issue in Ubuntu systems by patching Unity. If you ever experienced windows going black for no apparent reason, then you might be in for treat.

Some users have noticed that if they are using NVIDIA hardware on Ubuntu systems, they are confronted with an annoying problem. When opening the window of a new application, it would go black or become transparent. As it turns out, this is actually an old problem and there are bug reports dating back from Ubuntu 12.10 times.

It looks like NVIDIA is actually paying close attention to some of these bug reports that involve their hardware and they found out that they weren't to blame for it. In fact, the problem was caused by Compiz, which had some leftover code from a port.

NVIDIA found the issue and proposed a fix

An NVIDIA developer posted on Launchpad and said that the NVIDIA team has been looking at this issue and that they found Compiz to be at fault. They also proposed a fix for the problem.

"Our interpretation of the specification is that creating two GLX pixmaps pointing at the same drawable is not allowed, because it can lead to poorly defined behavior if the properties of both GLX drawables don't match. Our driver prevents this, but Compiz appears to try to do this," wrote NVIDIA's Arthur Huillet.

Soon after that, a patch has been issued for Compiz and it's been approved. A Reddit user noticed that this issue had been fixed and that the patch would be pushed in Ubuntu 15.04. Most likely, this patch will be backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as well.

Seeing NVIDIA getting hands-on with a problem that affected a Linux distribution is a great thing, especially since they didn't have to do anything about it since it wasn't technically their fault.