Someone might find this helpful: I managed to reduce the number of driver crashes considerably by disabling "suspend" and "off" mode in X. Section "ServerFlags" Option "SuspendTime" "0" Option "OffTime" "0" EndSection In the last 5-6 days, the driver crashed only once and I managed to bring X back without rebooting. For me, that's a huge improvement over the situation before where I had to reboot 2-3 times a day.