Linux, ATI drivers, and kernel upgrades, fraught with fragility.

[VirtualLarry]

Just curious if anyone has figured out a way to get around kernel upgrades breaking the ATI proprietary drivers, and losing your X server after a reboot?

I guess, when the ATI drivers install, they use the kernel headers currently on the machine to compile up a version of some files that is matched to your kernel. Thereafter, if you upgrade your kernel, things break.

A friend of mine tried doing the kernel upgrade, but not rebooting, and then re-installing the ATI drivers, but things still broke upon a reboot.

This seems to be a serious failing of Linux. Sure, some may shout "avoid proprietary drivers", but what is the alternative? Open-source video drivers suck. (Well, mostly, except for Intel, because they have actual Intel engineers developing their Linux open-source video drivers.)

 

[lxskllr]

It's not a failing of Linux, it's a failing of ATI. ATI has been garbage for everything, Windows included since the early 2000s at least. That continues to today with poor drivers, and poor support. Nvidia is hostile to Linux, but surprisingly, the proprietary drivers are pretty good, and nouveau(which I use) works well.

 

[HOSED]

Virtual Larry sorry to hear you are having issues, I saw may reports like this when I was shopping so I went with Iris Pro in the Sager. Unfortunately the latest iteration of Intel Drivers for Ubuntu 1.0.6 are not without issues either https://01.org/linuxgraphics/node/374 .. but their installer is great for novices like me.
I have been searching for 1.0.5 but have come up empty recently

 

[zokudu]

The ATI drivers need to be recompiled with every kernel upgrade. Most distro's that I have used that still support fglrx have some form of dkms setup to do it automatically when a kernel upgrade happens. What distro are you using and how did you install the fglrx drivers?

Also have you followed the radeon driver developments? Their open source driver is getting to be very competitive and you might look into trying those out for a bit if you're on a distro that runs very close to upstream.

 

[Jodell88]

This seems to be a serious failing of Linux. Sure, some may shout "avoid proprietary drivers", but what is the alternative? Open-source video drivers suck. (Well, mostly, except for Intel, because they have actual Intel engineers developing their Linux open-source video drivers.)

It's a failure of AMD, not Linux.

Nvidia releases a driver in time for every Xserver release, AMD releases a compatible driver about 3 to 4 months later, in time for Ubuntu's next release. AMD has even released special beta driver's just for Canonical to include in Ubuntu for release.

It's because of this glacial development cycle that Arch Linux actually dropped the Catalyst driver from the official repos with the reason that it was holding the entire graphics stack back.