There is a problem with >=xf86-video-ati-6.6, required for xorg-x11-7.1, which causes the driver to read open firmware data as video bios data. The discussion of the problem, the patch, and the modified ebuild are all in the following thread. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3560179.html#3560179
Created attachment 96283 [details, diff] patch to xf86-video-ati-6.6.2 for sanity checking A modified ebuild using the patch proposed by Ian Romanick from the thread. http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-August/017578.html
Created attachment 96284 [details] Modified ebuild that uses the patch.
It doesn't look like this patch has been committed upstream yet. Would you mind finding out why that hasn't happened? The impression I got from the thread is that they want to find the root cause, but it doesn't look like any progress has been made on that front.
We won't add this patch to the ebuild until it's accepted upstream. It might be a good idea to find/file a bug regarding this issue at https://bugs.freedesktop.org so that is gains visibility. If you do so, please post the link here.
Here is the link and bug report at freedesktop https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8500
Thanks. You should probably just attach the patch upstream, as they'll likely look at it sooner - it's a bit of a pain to follow links to find something.