It's a considerable annoyance that when an X server dies, or the
kernel panics with an X session on the console the kernel cannot reset
the video hardware.

To do this it would need something like a huge "reset" driver that
recognised vast quantities of hardware, or huge numbers of drivers
with one for each variety of card.

As a pragmatic option though, a program from userland could
potentially run at boot time, recognise the display hardware from a
database, and ioctl() a "script" into the kernel that describes how to
"stty sane" the video hardware.

I think that probably pairs of register number + value would be an
adequate scripting language, possibly with some "delay" command too.
Minimises kernel bloat, and code to support the feature.

This way the console drivers never really need loose control of the
hardware like they do now.

Good thing to do?  Bad thing to do?

Cheers,

Dave