From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri May 19 2006 - 11:45:48 CDT

Sabuj,

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 08:54:06PM -0500, Sabuj Pattanayek wrote:
> Hi,
>
> >This is probably the only way we'll ever get ATI to fix them.
>
> Have you ever spoken with/emailed an ATI engineer/technical person? Are
> they really doing anything to fix a handful of really annoying problems
> that make X nearly impossible to use with their drivers?

About two years ago I used to have some good contacts at ATI, but they
left the company and after that I lost touch with their engineering
department. About 3 weeks ago I was contacted directly by an ATI engineering
manager about getting these things fixed, and I sent them back a very
long detailed email which included crash tracebacks and other information,
so I'm hoping they are serious about improving their Linux drivers.
The more people they hear from the more likely they are to pay attention
is my philosophy. I'm currently reporting bugs to Apple as well, and
even in their case, they want to know how many people the bug affects, etc.

> The reason why I ask is that I've been doing exactly what you
> recommended since fglrx v8.8.25 on internet forums (rage3d), an
> unofficial bugzilla (ati.cchtml.com), as well as on their official
> support. There's even an online petition to ATI to fix their drivers
> which I signed (http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/petition.html , no
> I didn't start it). Yet, all I receive are canned messages and buggy
> driver updates from ATI support.
>
> >If you guys find different ways to crash the code, this should be
> >sent to ATI so they'll finally fix it.
>
> Yeah no problem, you don't even need to start VMD. Just login to X, wait
> a couple of seconds, logout of X, and your system is dead. No kernel
> panic, just a black screen. This has been happening since v8.16.20 .
>
> Don't let me discourage anyone from sending bug reports to ATI, but I'm
> done with ATI products for my x86 linux workstations and notebooks.

I understand completely. I think people should buy from the vendors
that give them the drivers and support they need to work without crashes,
bugs, etc.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078