Comment 55 for bug 121653

Philipp Kern wrote:
> The response would indeed be different if the source code had been
> available.
*snip* [it's hard debugging a binary blob]

Agreed. No argument there. The situation totally sucks.
> Complain to ATI please. It seems that they did not even respond to the
> Ubuntu Kernel devs, or claimed that the thing they do is valid. At least
> you can't find any claims that the SLUB allocator is wrong.
>
I have done this (http://support.ati.com/ics/support/mylogin.asp),
though that's really irrelevant. ATI isn't readying Ubuntu Gutsy for
release. Ubuntu developers are. So that's who we (the participants of
this bug report) are (in theory) communicating with. Talking to ATI in
this case is like talking to Square Peg, Inc. because a manufacturer
decided to use the latest Round Hole widgets in their thingamajig
instead of the more compatible Square Hole widgets. The choice to use
incompatible widgets was the manufacturer's, so that's who you talk to
when the thingamajig doesn't work.

And this isn't complaining - it's a discussion of a known issue with a
beta release and possible solutions, along with some consequences of the
latter. Whatever the details, the result of the current path taken will
be that some fundamental features of modern computing systems won't work
for a significant portion of the userbase. If the Ubuntu devs are aware
of this and it's an acceptable outcome, I have no problem with that. At
least with Linux we have choices, which include fixing it ourselves (and
sharing the fix with others) or choosing another distribution that
doesn't exhibit the problem. That's a wonderful thing.