In article <20020706122437.GA2686@idoru.mine.nu>,
	rasputin@idoru.mine.nu writes:
> Alll the ttys are dead, though if I sheel in remotely and
> restart xdm everything wakes up.

Dead it what sence? Can you still switch? Can you still see something?
Can you still enter something and e.g. login blindly?

It is possible that you cannot see anything anymore because the crashing
X11 server failed to restore the VGA card into text mode. There is not
much the kernel can do about this because it requires knowledge about
the specific chipset.

Maybe you submit a bug report to the XFree86 people asking them to
rewrite the server so that the console always gets reseted properly.
The server could e.g. save the state, fork(), do its work in the
child and restore the state from the parent if the child crashes.

> I noticed some commits last week to xsrc that were going to fix this,
> but can't seem to track them down - where they specific to a
> particular card (I have an AGP Voodoo3 3500)?

Last week's changes fixed a problem with ATI Radeon graphic cards where
the console would turn black if you use the card with 24BPP.

	Kind regards

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                  http://scheler.de/~matthias/