Five days to go, a release candidate is out and I felt like upgrading – then I noticed that bug #121653 (“fglrx breaks over suspend/resume”) is still open. I have a ThinkPad T60 with an ATI X1400 and I’m using the closed-source fglrx driver, so my setup is clearly affected by this bug.
As a solution I could switch to the free ATI driver, without 3D support, and with somehow degraded 2D performance. I don’t want that. Or I could just stop using Suspend-to-RAM. I don’t want that either. So either I wait until AMD fixed the driver, or I compile my own kernel with the SLAB allocator which is known to work with fglrx. I’m not sure whether the latter really is an option, it probably breaks other modules from the Ubuntu repositories, and I’m not keen on compiling every single piece myself. I’m running Ubuntu, not Gentoo. And the slogan “It Just Works” made me switch from Debian to Ubuntu…
Anyway, this shows once again how important open-source drivers are, and according to reports AMD is working already towards this direction. I will gladly install the open drivers once they are released.
Hannes Ebner on development and research 