Comment 52 for bug 347569

I haven't tried that, but as I understand it, they are tightly integrated and it's the DRM module that is crashing the system anyways, not the radeon driver piece, however the driver DOES need to be updated to solve the problem too. The radeon package only contains the xorg-driver loadable module, which provides the DRM piece access to provide the DRI interface for X programs. We need the DRM piece updated as the current one is buggy. The old one mistreats non-TCL cards and misuses the CPU, and the current one crashes often on TCL cards. I just don't see being able to quickly pass a whole DRM/driver upgrade process as this will affect everyone on all systems. BTW the driver/drm on that site is mainly for radeon, so I'm not sure how the upgrade would affect Intel/nv/nouveau drivers.

I have been testing these new drivers and DRM on a TCL enabled card and they are stable and functional without needing any upgrade to Mesa. I have had a crash running WoW on wine, but that was after playing for hours in D3D mode. I couldn't even get into the world at all before with the current drivers without kernel locking the system. The crash I experienced only took down wine, not X, so it was more likely a wine problem. If we could possibly pull these patches for the radeon branch of DRM alone that would be great, but I think considerable core DRM updates exist in this newer version which may prevent it. One more thing to note: I noticed that if I run the 2.6.30 kernel with these new modules the system runs fluidly and when I ran 2.6.28 I received random freezing which would resume after a few seconds until one time I received a total hard lock (numlock no longer worked). So there is a problematic kernel portion involved in this too. I am running on ext4, so that may be the problem there. This was in WoW of course, but I expect similar results in any other intense 3D apps.

All OpenGL apps/games I've tried work just fine (extreme tux racer, warzone 2100, blender).
Oh, and for a real teaser, WoW runs at 10-20 FPS in a busy area in wine D3D mode on my Radeon 9600 without needing to disable any extensions (I could not get opengl mode to work unfortunately). All other 3D apps are equally fluid and nice. It's not a superb card by any stretch of the imagination, so likely all radeon cards should see impressive improvements. Still need to test non-TCL cards though for the original problem of this thread. My non-TCL laptop has been upgraded to karmic so this driver is not necessary anymore for it. It runs fine.

The caveats are that I noticed a few graphical anomolies in wine d3d with the texture handling, but nothing that causes tremendous harm. It was working better than I've ever seen on OSS radeon drivers.