Proprietary drivers

[Steve Harvey]

  I have a lenovo ThinkPad with ATI X1300 video.  The latest
proprietary driver that I can download from ATI's support site 
for it is the Catalyst 9.3 driver.  Under Debian Lenny (2.6.26
kernel), it often generates kernel tracebacks when I suspend
to RAM.  Most of the time it is noticable only in the logfiles
but occasionally the system is practically unusable until
Xorg is killed and the driver reloaded, which defeats the 
purpose of using s2ram.

  Now, if I use the open source driver instead, it wants to
set the brightness at the medium setting (which for ThinkPads
is too often too dim).  The only quick way to adjust the brightness
that I've found so far is to switch to a text console, do it 
there, and switch back.  However, about 1 in 20 times, the box 
just locks up when trying to switch back, necessitating a reboot.  
Applications such as Google Earth are also much slower.

  ATI has effectively orphaned my video card, despite the 
laptop being still under warranty.  The Catalyst driver is now
at version 9.6, but a number of hardware models including my
X1300 "have been moved to the legacy software support 
structure". 
  
  I've also got openSuSE and an ancient Ubuntu on the laptop
and I'd really like to stick with Debian for now but these
driver problems are too disruptive.


  Another proprietary driver that has recently caused me
problems is a Linux driver for a partial network stack from a 
well-known networking company.  It used the MMX or SSE
instructions to do it's crypto, but under sufficiently new kernels
didn't ensure at interrupt time that it was using the proper 
context, ergo corrupting MMX or floating point operations
in some random process and probably causing random
performance stalls in it's communications as well.  Again
at the mercy of a cathedral.


  Licenses for these drivers prohibit reverse engineering
and while I can appreciate these companies wanting to
protect their investments in IP, there is a problem when
this interferes with interoperability.
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