13 Years After Launch, The Open-Source Radeon Linux Driver Sees Occasional ATI R5xx Fix

It's not too often these days that new kernel updates bring changes to the pre-GCN Radeon Linux driver, but overnight a fix has been queued for helping out at least some users still running with ATI R5xx series hardware.

R500 is what was the Radeon X1000 series more than a decade ago. On the Microsoft side, Windows 7 was the end of the road for the Radeon X1000 series hardware while under Linux the open-source driver code continues to see rare commits. This latest bit of work for R500 is a PLL fix to fix flickering in some cases.

The change now has the legacy Radeon driver preferring lower reference dividers rather than the closest divider. At least for the user who reported a flicker bug last year, this patch resolves those screen flickers.

With R500 hardware rarely seeing use these days, the bug was actually around for a few years but at least now is resolved. This PLL fix was sent in to DRM-Next along with fixes for more recent issues around ATPX, SR-IOV, and a crash fix for the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel.