Comment 254 for bug 121653

Here's my responses to each suggestion:

1) Providing a SLAB kernel flavour means we also have to provide lum, lbm and lrm for this kernel, and keep security updates for it. Way too much overhead.

2) Updated fglrx for gutsy-backports does not pass SRU policies, plus it is impossible to just include an updated lum in gutsy backports because of ABI skew between gutsy-security. Not to mention, we are less than 2 months away from hardy release. Users can easily upgrade to hardy now or later

3) (Brad's suggestion): We've already included the latest fglrx in hardy (perhaps a new one has become available recently, in which case we will get to including that one before release).

I cannot explain in enough detail here why it is not easy to supply a "fixed kernel for gutsy" or "backports fglrx" for gutsy. It is very complex, and very time consuming. We are in the final stretches of hardy. The main reason for our 6-monthly release cycle is to make bugs like this less important, since a fix is "just around the corner". If this affected an LTS release, we would be more prone to fixing the issue.

Thanks for the understanding. I would be very interested in whether this affected current hardy kernel. It would be much more appropriate to continue reporting and commenting on this bug with ATI directly, as they are the ones that can fix it. Using SLUB, which allows for better performance across all systems, is an option we chose because it is a huge benefit. Just because a proprietary driver is broken in this condition is not a reason for us to revert it, penalizing all users. Instead, the driver needs to be fixed.