The Graphic Drivers for AMD/ATI were always the main reason why I did buy NVIDIA. As long as I can think back, there have always been problems with those drivers.<p>I didn't have any of their cards for a decade until I got an old company Dell and hooked it up to the TV. From time to time it forgets that there IS sound coming through the HDMI cable. I googled around. Seems to be a common problem for several versions already. It seemed to have been fixed for some people. Some...<p>I can't understand how you can allow such things as a big company today.
This is an (unfortunately) fairly common class of vulnerability. Many applications fall victim to this form of attack because they don't think to check signatures on binaries. There is a tool, EvilGrade (<a href="https://code.google.com/p/isr-evilgrade/" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/isr-evilgrade/</a>), designed to assist in demonstrating these types of attacks.
<a href="http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDauto-updatenotification.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDauto-updatenot...</a><p>> Due to a minor security vulnerability in the auto-update notification<p>Palm, meet face.
Update: I take it the automatic update feature was a Windows only thing?<p>I've had machines using FGLRX off and on for years and never realized it had this feature. Guess that's a good thing, though, considering it evidently was never well implemented. It also seems like bad idea as you might lose compatibility between whichever specific driver/kernel pair if you aren't careful.<p>But I take exception to those who claim the Catalyst install process is horrendous. I think AMD's process of<p>./<installerName> --buildpkg <distro/version><p>followed by:<p><package manager install command (for example, dpkg -i)> <generated package name><p>and tying in to the DKMS subsystem is much more convenient than Nvidia's approach which directly patches itself into your kernel in a way that would force you to manually reinstall it after every kernel update (unless you were using a distro packaged version, obviously). Maybe they've changed that? (Right now I'm using the distro-packaged driver on my nVidia system.)<p>While I'm not happy with the current AMD Linux driver mostly because it lacks video decode/render accel as nice as VDPAU, I think most of the other frequent complaints about the driver tend to be a little unfair considering how you can often have obnoxious problems with the nVidia binary as well. With things like HDMI it's been my experience that both drivers tend to have some eccentricities, for example.