Video driver in the initrd.gz

I have an ATI Radeon HD 6450 card. Sometimes upon boot, just when the console should switch to the screen native resolution, it apparently fails to do so. The screen goes black and the computer restarts.

I suspect there is some problem with loading the radeon driver. Therefore I decided to include it in my initrd image, together with the filesystem driver. Like this:

mkinitrd -c -k 3.10.17 -m ext4:radeon -o /boot/initrd-radeon.gz

The firmware got included automatically and the size of the generated initrd-radeon.gz is 6.8 MB. The screen switches to its native resolution a little bit earlier when booting. The problem does not occur anymore and I have not observed any issues, except that once X crashed over a period of 3 months.

However, I do not know if it is safe to do this and I have never seen anyone use this approach! I put it here solely for my future reference.

Therefore, I asked in the LQ forum three months ago how safe this is. People actually suggested that I better check my RAM and or to upgrade the kernel. When I have more time I will do that, but for now this fix seems to work.

If someone knows better, please let me know.

UPDATE (28 May 2015): I upgraded my kernel to 3.18.11 and the problem seems to not occur anymore.