ATI — again.. All the TIme

So I have upgraded my kernel.  Day three.  I finally realized why suspend doesn't work anymore.  Because along with this kernel update, I also updated the infamous ATI drivers.  My never ending nightmare.

I don't want to say that suspend/resume was always dependable.  It worked, sometimes.  Most of the times, it didn't.  Basically, it was random.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.  When it didn't, I risked losing all my work.  I was conscious about it, but I still risked, saying—“hey, Linux is in heavy development; I'm using a bleeding-edge kernel; folks don't have support from hardware producers” etc.

It is only today when I realized, after another 3 painful days trying to set things up for the millionth time, that it's not the kernel and it's not Debian.  It's ATI.  Yes, if you upgrade to kernel 2.6.22.1 and to latest ATI drivers (8.39.4 as I write this) then suspend doesn't work.  It hangs with this message:  “Suspending console(s)”.

I rebooted a million times.  I tried a million variants, only to come up to the logical conclusion (and I wonder how was I stupid enough not to think about it from the first place): “fglrx” can't suspend.  It worked, sometimes, with a certain combination of fglrx and kernel versions, but it was buggy.  And I blamed it on the wrong side.

By pure chance, I switched my X to a “vesa” driver today to find out that suspend/resume works flawlessly, over and over.  Never crashes.  With “fglrx”, it crashed twice a day (in those days when it worked at all).  But VESA is sooo slow.  I guess I should be thankful to ATI that they gave me this buggy driver that wasted tens of hours of my life (but it's oh so fast).

I'm almost 30.  It's mid 2007.  And I can't suspend my laptop.  Thanks to ATI.  They can't write a good driver, yet they won't release any documentation.  Basically, they don't grant us the right to use their expensive crap hardware—which we paid for.  Doesn't this suck?!