There are _two_ (essentially independent and _competing_) open source driver projects for
R600/700 ATI GPUs: “radeon” and “radeonhd”.

- “radeon” is developed under AMD/ATI’s lead, with major contributions from Red Hat and some
independent Xorg developers. At this time “radeon” is the _only_ reasonably complete and well-working
open source driver for modern ATI cards. It provides 2D acceleration, 3D support under both UMS and KMS
(DRI and DRI2, respectively), support for OpenGL 2.1, working suspend/resume (both of these latter
features need kernel mode setting, KMS), and basic power management features.

- “radeonhd” is developed under Novell’s lead, again with contributions from independent Xorg developers.
And although having been started first, the “radeonhd” project is far behind “radeon” in providing a
useable driver.

Your suggestion to talk about the problem to ATI is pointless, as they _already provide_ a reasonable driver,
namely “radeon”.

It’s up to the _distros_ to package this driver with their Xorg versions, and to take care
of the order in which certain kernel modules and firmware files are loaded, which KMS needs to work
(Kernel version 2.6.33 already _has_ support for KMS on Radeon cards enabled by default!).

And here Fedora and Ubuntu are doing a great job, while openSUSE fails by making the inferior
radeonhd their default driver which lacks essentially all of the above features. There is _no_
technological reason whatsoever to prefer “radeonhd” over “radeon”. The only conceivable reason is
a political one.