AMD Watermark: "Testing Use Only"

Today AMD had released the 8.39.4 display driver, which offers support for Fedora 7 and also corrects some bugs. However, at least one serious issue has crept into this driver. If you are running the fglrx driver right now, chances are there's a black and green watermark in the lower right hand corner of your screen that says "AMD Testing Use Only". This watermark is only supposed to display on internal/beta fglrx builds.

This watermark is appearing as a signature file in /etc/ati/ is not generated when using distribution-specific packaging scripts. If you run the graphical fglrx installer, /etc/ati/signature will be properly generated and you won't experience these problems. However, if you are using the --buildpkg argument with Fedora, Ubuntu, and other distributions, this file is not generated. With the missing signature, you are stuck with this watermark. This signature file doesn't appear to work if copying between computers.

AMD is currently investigating this issue but currently there is no official workaround. This presents the possibility that AMD will be issuing a hot-fix Linux driver release tomorrow or early next week. Discuss this in the Phoronix Forums.