ATI Linux Display Driver 8.2 : Fixes X Server Bugs

Dark Star · 15-02-2008, 09:46 AM

A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night, for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release fixes some important X server bugs, such as:

The X server no longer crashes if the screen resolution is changed in horizontal or vertical desktop setup with a monitor that does not support DDC;
The X server no longer segfaults or fails to initialize DRI if a BusID was specified in an unexpected format in xorg.conf;
The X server no longer freezes on shutdown if atieventsd is running;
The first OpenGL application run after starting a session on X server version 1.4 no longer hangs.

Known issues of this release:

On workstation hardware 3D applications will be corrupted if the screen width is not an integer multiple of 64 pixels, for example with a 1680x1050 wide screen display;
There is no support for video playback on the second head in dual head mode;
Desktop corruption may be noticed when dragging the overlay/video when using dual-display mode;
A black screen may be observed on some hardware when switching to the console or leaving the X window system when a Vesa framebuffer console driver is used;
Display flicker may be noticed when the gnome screen-saver starts;
Diagonal tearing may be noticed when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension;
Video playback may look blocky when playing a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension;
Video Playback may display wrong colors and additional shadow images when cropping or expanding a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension;
Building RPM packages for Mandriva may fail.

In order to gain the best performance and ease of use, ATI/AMD recommends the following:

Kernel module build environment – should include the following: Kernel source code: either the Kernel Source or Kernel Headers packages.
ISSE Support enabled in your Linux Kernel (applies to Intel Pentium III and later CPUs only; enabled by default on version 2.4 and later kernels).
The rpm utility should be installed and configured correctly on your system, if you intend to install it via RPM packages.

Requirements:

XOrg 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 or 7.3
Linux kernel 2.6 or higher
glibc version 2.2 or 2.3
POSIX Shared Memory (/dev/shm) support is required for 3D applications.

If you have a machine running Linux kernel 2.4, you should install version 8.42.3 of the ATI Catalyst software suite.

Supported operating systems: