The last post (minus the hard disk driver crash during preparation for S3 issue) turns out to be a rather embarrassing case of not doing the research, so I deserve a punch from a drm/radeon dev for that.

What I should've done if I were connected to the Internet at the time I decided to start to experiment with KMS again, is reading the instructions from the X.org wiki for properly setting up the drivers with KMS support. It wasn't as trivial as I had expected because of the missing firmware blobs I mentioned the last time.

I was hoping to not have any more problems with Linux and my HP Pavilion dv5-1132la laptop since the last installment of this series of posts. However, with the release of Linux 2.6.33 and the improvements on KMS and general direct rendering support for the ATI R6xx and R7xx chipsets, I wanted to give KMS a try — this kernel version also improves support for some HDMI thing that I don't understand exactly what it is about, apparently related to digital audio devices or something.

(In other words, I shouldn't be complaining. Most of what comes in this post is the result of a voluntary experiment, and not some unfortunate incompatibility...probably.)