Comment 80 for bug 278318

While the new/proposed driver does prevent the tearing problem, it also causes another problem as I said before

About 10% of the time that I open a movie in mplayer, the screen will entirely switch to one (random) color

Oddly, the programs running are still responsive (i.e. 'q' still quits, and 'space' still pauses mplayer), but there is no way to use the computer at this point. Switching to a virtual console (ctrl-alt-F1) simply causes the screen to black out. Ctrl-alt-backspace has no effect.

The only way to recover is to reboot the system.

The whole screen also flickers before any video starts.

Should this be reportedas a new bug?