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Date:      Tue, 24 Feb 1998 02:34:19 -0800
From:      Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>
To:        Andrzej Bialecki <abial@nask.pl>
Cc:        Kazutaka YOKOTA <yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Proposed addition to panic() behaviour 
Message-ID:  <199802241034.CAA23367@rah.star-gate.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 24 Feb 1998 11:13:16 %2B0100." <Pine.NEB.3.95.980224111015.22979A-100000@korin.warman.org.pl> 

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> On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Kazutaka YOKOTA wrote:
> 
> > >> > Many people (including me) suffered from panic while their console was in
> > >> > graphic mode (e.g. X Window). I don't know if this would be proper place
> > >> > to do this, but in case of panic (where everything is lost anyway) just
> > >> > add there the code to forcefully reset the video card to set it in
> > >> > known (and useful) mode...
> > >> 
> > >> See the numerous "DDX in the kernel" discussions in the -current list
> > >> archives to see why "just add there the code to forcefully reset the
> > >> video card" requires knowing how the video card got in the mode it's
> > >> in, and specific knowledge of the card (hint: write-only hardware
> > >> registers not shadoewed in RAM).
> > >
> 
> > >But I also vaguely recall something like dump of VGA registers
> > >when booted with -v, so they are stored somewhere, right?
> > 
> > The video BIOS ROM contains the table of STANDARD register values only.
> > We cannot know which additional registers should be set to what value.
> 
> Ok. Call me stubborn, but why can't we just write the STANDARD register
> values corresponding to the initial state of the card, and if the screen
> is still garbled, well <shrug> - at least we tried... But, my point is (or
> maybe I'm still wrong), that *most of the time* this will restore the card
> to some usable state...
> 

Look I worked on low level graphic support for S3 cards as well as other
graphic cards and is not an easy thing to do at least in a clean fashion.
You can however write a simple shell program that monitors the X server
and restart it if you need to or use xdm which is supposed to re-start
an X server if it dies -- usually it just pops you back to a login screen
if the X server dies.


However... if you think you can do it go ahead thats the attitute which
allow me to port X to 386bsd 0.0 8)


	Amancio






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