Mike A. Harris wrote:
Doing a bit of investigation has shown that it isn't just the
r300 DRI driver that is instable, but even just loading the X server
DRI module with many r300 or newer cards causes the system to crash,
even if DRI is actually disabled, and even if the r300 DRI driver is
not even present on the system.
I believe that this is almost surely this problem:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2005-December/011678.html
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4847
http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/ChangeLog?rev=1....
There are some important memory map and other fixes for Radeon cards
(especially R300 and above) that hit the xorg CVS tree on February
17, after 7.0. (The author considered them a little too experimental
for 7.0.) Apparently without the fixes many people saw lockups using
R300 cards without DRI enabled or the r300 DRI drive present. However,
with these fixes the instability goes away.
Perhaps these upstream CVS patches could be integrated into the Fedora
Core patches. If so, the r300 driver could be left in FC5. Of course,
we are running low on time, but I think it's a relatively critical bug.
Especially if the recent Mesa change doesn't solve the crashes for
everyone.
John Thacker