Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 4285
S3 Virge / GX 3D Chipset seems to fail to restore VT text mode
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:51 EDT
During Xconfigurators probing of the card for modes, or after exiting from X, the text mode of the VT is scrambled. None of the fixes listed in bugs 129 or 155 seems to correct this error. I have seen this bug in 5.2 and 6.0. Even upgrading to the 3.3.3.1-52 packages had no effect. restoretextmode did not help. setfont did not help. Both the SVGA and S3V servers get the same results. Xwindows itself runs fine, as you can use it without trouble. The color terminal screens show none of the scambling that has occured in the regular terminals. The system does not lock up in any way.
I would be quite willing to ship you my video card for the sake of experimentation, if that would be helpful. I have spare parts aplenty. I tried a fresh install of 6.0 and the error is still present.
Dave, please verify this bug with the new test 3.3.5 release, will you?
What is the exact chipset of your card as reported in /proc/pci? Is it a ViRGE/GX or ViRGE/GX2? ------- Additional Comments From 08/31/99 21:24 ------- /proc/pci identifies it as a Virge/DX or GX(rev 1). The company who made the card identifies it as a S# Virge GX 3D Chipset. Hope this helps.
I have upgraded the system to the new 3.3.5-0.6.0 XFree86 packages. Still shows the same error. I'm getting to the point where I may just take a few months to examine all the possible culprits in terms of code. I'm really only an amatuer coder, but why not. Maybe it's something fairly simple... Any suggestions on where to look?
Are you using the framebuffer console?
Nope, just running it Using the standard methods. The card is supported under the SVGA server at 24bit color 1024x768. Xconfigurator identifies it neatly, and sets it up without trouble. The only difficulty is that once it probes for video modes, you have to proceed from memory through the menus to finish up. It becomes unreadable. It looks something like this text: S e] p i sx d o n y As if its adding spaces and wrapping the text around about 1 1/2 times the screen width. X remains fine though. Once it's started, you notice nothing until you attempt to go back to the VT.
I did a quick card switch just to check out a thought. I replaced one Virge GX card with another Virge GX card from a different manufacturer. The original was a card from AOpen, called the PT75 Plus II. This is the card with the VT problem. The STB card I put in had no such error. It might be good to list this card as a lemon somewhere in the hardware compat list. I'm going to stick the card in a test system at work for experimentation. Let me know if anyone still wants to pursue this bug..
we'll close it since we can't seem to duplicate it with anything but that evil card, but we will also add it to our "unsupported hardware" list.