Re: [patch] Re: Framebuffer...Why oh Why???

[Timothy Covell <timothy.covell@ashavan.org>]

On Monday 31 December 2001 15:41, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Sunday 30 December 2001 07:19 pm, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Sun, 30 Dec 2001, Timothy Covell wrote:
> > > 	When X11 locks up, I can still kill it and my box lives.  When
> > > framebuffers crash, their is no recovery save rebooting.  Back in 1995
> > > I thought that linux VTs and X11 implemenation blew Solaris out of the
> > > water, and now we want throw away our progress?  I'm still astounded
> > > by the whole "oooh I can see  a penquin while I boot-up" thing?
> > > Granted, frame buffers have usage in embedded systems, but do they
> > > really have to be so deeply integrated??
> >
> > They aren't.
> >
> > No sane person should use frame buffers if they have the choice.
> >
> > Like your mama told you: "Just say no". Use text-mode and X11, and be
> > happy.
> >
> > Some people don't have the choice, of course.
> >
> > 		Linus
>
> X11 isn't always an improvement.  I've got an X hang on my laptop (about
> once a week) that freezes the keyboard and ignores mouse clicks.  Numlock
> doesn't change the keyboard LEDs, CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE won't do a thing, and
> although I can ssh in and run top (and see the CPU-eating loop), kill won't
> take X down and kill-9 leaves the video display up so the console that
> thinks it's in text mode, but isn't, is still useless.  (And that's
> assuming I'm plugged into the network and have another box around to ssh in
> from...)
>
> Compiling a debug version of X to run under gdb via ssh is on my to-do
> list...
>
> A userspace program that takes over your main I/O devices modally and keeps
> them if it hangs isn't THAT much better than having the kernel ignore you
> directly...
>
> Rob

Well laptops traditionally are made with some rather funky stuff.  And laptops
are made to be shutdown and restarted often, so I'd just make sure that I ran
ReiserFS and/or ext3 on it and be happy when it works at all.

-- 
timothy.covell@ashavan.org.