> I frequently have X sitting in the background, accessing it a couple
> of times a day, and occasionally a SVGAlib program crashes badly,
> totally screwing up the VC's.
> However, when I switch back to X, it all sorts it'self out.
> So, either X is storing state in a write-only part of the card, and
> using some sort of "switch registers", to switch to alternate registers, or
> it's keeping track of what state it thinks the card is in, and rewriting
> that when it restarts.
> I don't see how checkpointing is any different to the X server than
> starting an SVGAlib app that eats all memory, causes the X server to get
> totally swapped out, and then crashes without restoring the state.
It is not much different, but:
1. SVGAlib doesn't do the fancy stuff. It is mostly unaccelerated.
2. You have been lucky.
3. You may have well-behaved hardware.
I had a card crash so hard that none of this fixed it:
1. starting X
2. SVGATextMode
3. reboot via reset button, with a BIOS that does VGA tricks...
4. ...into Windows NT with official video drivers
So your it-works-for-me isn't good enough for everyone.
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