On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 01:44:13PM -0500, Michael wrote:
> 
> >  Whatever strange things XFree does to the display machfb
> >should be able to undo.
> Sort of. But this isn't quite as easy. When XFree exits it tries to set 
> everything back to the state it found when starting - works fine on my 
> U10. Then it uses some ioctl() to silence the console while it's 
> working and another one to tell the console it can take over again, I 
> use it to clean things up when XFree exits ( cleaning the screen for 
> instance, but that's not yet in the cvs tree ). But if XFree crashes or 
> we get a kernel panic there's no graceful exit, therefore no ioctl() to 
> tell machfb what's going on and ultimately no console output on the 
> screen.

Oh, in that case, there should already be a hook that is called when
entering DDB or panic-ing specifically for this purpose.  ISTR it
was even wired up to call into the wscons infrastructure.  I wouln't
think adding plugging machfb into that would be too much work.  Or
was that backed out?  

In any case, you should be able to add a hook into Debugger() to
undo whatever that ioctl() did and get the console back.

Eduardo