Comment 29 for bug 24533

I was also looking at the discussion on bug # 16873, which appears to be the same problem, but they are looking at the radeon driver side rather than the kernel, and they appear to have a patch that's looking promising, but it's edgy only at this point. But a 'stable release' (does that mean dapper?) will probably be made soon.
  Now this brings up a more basic question: Does the Radeon driver run as a kernel module, so when it crashes, it takes the kernel with it, or does it run in userspace? I ask the question because if it is the latter, then fixing the driver would only be a circumvention, not a fix for the kernel lockups, right? In that case, we should keep the broken radeon driver around, and make sure the appropriate hardware gets to a kernel developer who can use it to discover the underlying kernel bug.