On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 10:29:13PM +0100, Arto Huusko wrote:
> 
> What is one supposed to do, when X (4.1.0, don't remember the date)
> hangs hard (on 1.5.2/i386). By hanging hard I mean that X crashes, but
> as it goes, it crashes the display with it:
> 
>  1. the display freezes, and doesn't drop to console mode
>  2. virtual consoles can't be switched
>  3. no use trying to kill X, as it is already dead
> 
> I was able to log in to the computer using telnet, but that's it.
> I couldn't recover the display, so I had to reboot.
> 
> Also, I could drop to DDB (since telnet stopped responding), and
> continue from there, but still the frozen X screen stayed on.
> 
> Somehow, this feels as a bug of some kind.

Yes, most probably in the X server.
The X server is responsible for restoring the adapter in text mode (there
is no way to do this without a driver for each specific video adapter),
so if X crashes hard the display stay in hi-res mode.

> 
> (As I wrote the above, I realize that I didn't try to actually
> restart X... from the telnet login for example. Would that have worked?)

I've seen situations where this would work.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
--