Matthieu Herrb writes:

>  > I have in my system a S3/Virge card.  About once a month, something bites
>  > the X server, causing it to coredump and leaves the console unreadable.
>  > (Unless I log in from another system and restart the server, but things
>  > don't come up quite right, then.)
>  > 
>  > Is there any way of resetting the graphics, short of rebooting the system?
> 
> Unfortunatly not. The console drivers don't know how to completly
> reinitialize a VGA board to a given text mode. Each chipset has its
> own set of registers to program. So writing a program that takes a VGA 
> board in an unknown state and resets it to a known text mode is
> nontrivial, and putting it into the kernel is probably a bad idea. 

Hmmm, figured so.

Of course maybe, just maybe, some userland daemon could carry out the
task...

I'm not saying this is a good idea yet...  Just an idea... :)