Re: rollback X, SIS671/771
On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:06:01 -0500, David L. Craig wrote:
> 1. I have an S3Virage that incurred similar issues. I have
> backed up all my filesystems, freed up the space, and installed
> a fresh Lenny with good results so far. Hopefully I will not
> have time to debug further but if I do, I will follow-up on d-u.
>
> 2. I am satisfied the graphics hardware is still functional. I
> am not sure whether the issue is in the 2.6.32 kernel or Xorg.
> I do know 2.6.32 breaks my old SCSI support! Sid has finally
> forced me to return to the good old days. And my Lenny install
> was not a piece of cake for this experienced sysadmin.
According to Ron Lee, Debian package maintainer for the
svgatextmode package, recent Linux kernels have taken over direct
control of the video hardware, and recent releases of X now make
system calls to the kernel to change video modes. He refers to
it as "Kernel Modesetting Stuff" (KMS). I don't know if that is
any kind of official designation or if that's just his pet name
for it. With such a massive migration of code from one place
to another, we can probably expect some problems in this area.
Fortunately, it does not appear to affect my system, which uses
an Nvidia TNT2 chipset. This change ultimately let to
svgatextmode being dropped from the archive for Squeeze. :-(
Perhaps someone else who knows more about it and is listening
can elaborate. I'm not saying that this change is the cause of
your problem, but it would be the first thing that I would
suspect. A similar thing occurred a while back when a lot of
mouse code migrated from gpm to the kernel itself.
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