From owner-freebsd-hardware Tue Oct 26 6:52:32 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from polaris.we.lc.ehu.es (polaris.we.lc.ehu.es [158.227.6.43]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3881F14CB7 for ; Tue, 26 Oct 1999 06:50:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jose@we.lc.ehu.es) Received: from we.lc.ehu.es (garatu [158.227.6.222]) by polaris.we.lc.ehu.es (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id PAA14744; Tue, 26 Oct 1999 15:42:38 +0200 (MET DST) Message-ID: <3815AFCE.DB4ECE98@we.lc.ehu.es> Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 15:42:38 +0200 From: "Jose M. Alcaide" Organization: Universidad del =?iso-8859-1?Q?Pa=EDs?= Vasco - Dpto. de Electricidad y =?iso-8859-1?Q?Electr=F3nica?= X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: es-ES, es, en-US, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Kazutaka YOKOTA Cc: Mike Nowlin , freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: a desirable fetaure: syscons reset utility References: <199910260748.QAA15139@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Kazutaka YOKOTA wrote: > > This won't reliably work, if the said program is saving/restoring only > the standard VGA registers. Because the X server touches various > extra registers which are not present in the standard VGA, you need to > save these registers as well as the standard VGA registers. Restoring > only the standard VGA registers is not enough to bring the video card > back to known state. > > When vidcontrol issues the ioctl command to switch the video mode, the > vga video driver will set the standard VGA registers to the values > listed in the card's BIOS ROM (or use the VESA BIOS to set up the > VESA video mode). If the video BIOS cannot set up the card, then, > what can we do? > This is very interesting. Then, the conclusion is that this problem should be redirected to the XFree86 people: perhaps, they could write a utility (probably adapted to each Xserver) that restores the [S]VGA registers. BTW, when the Xserver crashes, sometimes the keyboard is also left in an unusable state and "kbd_mode -a" does not solve the problem. Perhaps a new "reset" option for kbdcontrol could be useful and easy to implement 8) -- JMA ----------------------------------------------------------------------- José Mª Alcaide | mailto:jose@we.lc.ehu.es Universidad del País Vasco | mailto:jmas@FreeBSD.org Dpto. de Electricidad y Electrónica | http://www.we.lc.ehu.es/~jose Facultad de Ciencias - Campus de Lejona | Tel.: +34-946012479 48940 Lejona (Vizcaya) - SPAIN | Fax: +34-946013071 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers" -- Leonard Brandwein To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message