As much as I love open source software, I tend to shy away from the die-hard “OpenSource or bust” people. I use closed-source (“restricted”) drivers when need be, and they usually work better, since the vendors can optimize them.

I’m quite frustrated, though, with ATI… The closed-source fglrx drivers give good performance, but have some major problems. Namely, they just don’t work with Xen. I’ve been looking to set up some virtual machines, but I have the choice of using VMs or having video drivers…

And hibernate / software suspend has never worked. It turns out that this is also a known bug caused by using the closed-source fglrx drivers.

It turns out that the Ubuntu kernel team is aware of both of these, and trying to find ways to fix it. But the problem lies in a closed-source module, so their hands are tied.

Argh!