Re: screen goes black

[Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>]

On Sunday 17 December 2000 04:41, Terry 'Mongoose' Hendrix II wrote:
> Russell Coker wrote:
> > No it is definately not a wiring issue.  The entire screen goes blank but
> > any text being displayed appears.  So if I keep typing then anything I
> > type appears, but the rest of the screen stays blank until I take some
> > action to cause a re-draw (IE switching virtual terminals or scrolling a
> > text-mode screen).
>
> I read that as text and graphics.
>
> If it's refreshing very slow, it may just be a slow machine or low
> memory.  I would help if you mention your video chipset, memory, and cpu.

It's a Thinkpad T20, the latest series from IBM, it's one of the fastest 
laptops on the market.  It was previously working fine until I recompiled my 
kernel (with the same version and options as before).  This machine 
outperforms most desktop machines that are being sold today, and for server 
type operations outperforms most Sun server machines.

The symptoms (for the third time) are that the screen goes entirely blank but 
then anything which is re-drawn (for any reason) displays fine.

/proc/cpuinfo:
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 8
model name      : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping        : 3
cpu MHz         : 647.000199
cache size      : 256 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
sep_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov 
pat pse36 mmx fxsr xmm
bogomips        : 1291.06

rjc@lyta:~/athome$free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        255692     253620       2072          0      37848     113736
-/+ buffers/cache:     102036     153656
Swap:       211640          0     211640

From /proc/pci:
  Bus  1, device   0, function  0:
    VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86C270-294 Savage/MX-/IX (rev 17).
      IRQ 11.
      Master Capable.  Latency=64.  Min Gnt=4.Max Lat=255.
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xf0000000 [0xf7ffffff].

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