AMD 8.38.7 Display Driver

The train has gone off the tracks. In The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, AMD's Matthew Tippett had shared with us that the AMD driver release cycle is like a train and that "...we are on the train, and to add a new carriage or update the carriage, we have to do it while the train is running, without stopping the train, or letting anything fall off." However, this morning the train (AMD's release schedule) has went off the tracks for the penguin riders. AMD has issued its first-ever hot-fix release for the Linux fglrx driver. This release corrects an aticonfig crash that removes the xorg.conf if you are using the vesa driver.

It was only this past Monday that the AMD 8.38.6 display driver was released, but coming out of the AMD Customer Care center is a new hot-fix release. This driver is at version 8.38.7 and corrects an issue where running aticonfig with the --initial argument will create a segmentation fault that destroys the xorg.conf. This segmentation fault only occurs when running X with the vesa driver.

The AMD 8.38.6 display driver had introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 packaging support along with fixing a few bugs, but the driver was one of the least interesting releases in recent times. Outside of the aticonfig fix in 8.38.7, there appear to be no other official or unofficial changes that make up this release. Nor does this release introduce Fedora 7 support. Granted, the previous release just went out the door three days ago. Hopefully the AMD release train will get back on its tracks in time for next month with no further derailments.

You can discuss this driver in the Phoronix Forums.