On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Matthias Drochner wrote:
> prlw1@newn.cam.ac.uk said:
> > Yes - the Device busy messages didn't seem to matter on other
> > computers... Then again, this is the only one with a ATI Technologies
> > Mach64 GW (rev. 0x7a) in it. 
> 
> At which point does it freak out? What happens if you avoid
> virtual console switching completely? (might be that something
> in the switch process messes up the graphics card)

FWIW, I had exactly the same problem with an ATI Mach64. It started after
I added a 2-port ISA serial card (go figure). During boot, the console
would go blank until the xdm login appeared.

I tracked it down to something 'ttyflags -a' was doing in /etc/rc.
Commenting out all uneccesary crud in /etc/ttys cured it for me. It didn't
seem to be sufficient to just mark ttys as `off'.

I'm not running gettys on any of the 4 com ports on my system, so I
commented those out too. It might have been the duplicate entries for
/dev/console and /dev/ttyE0 (the former was marked as `off').

Having done that, virtual console switching works fine now.

As to the *why* of it, this is a NetBSD/i386 1.4 machine at work where I
don't get any time to debug NetBSD problems, so I haven't a clue why it
happens.

Cheers, Steve