Re: Linux-1.3.71..
Curtiss (1CMC3466@ibm.mtsac.edu)
Wed, 06 Mar 96 02:46:21 PST
On Tue, 5 Mar 1996 19:43:48 -0500 (EST) you said:
>
>
>On Tue, 5 Mar 1996, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>> Hi, I'd ask everybody who have seen strange things with virtual consoles to
>try
>> out 1.3.71 - I found a potential reason for the "bleeding" behaviour (where
>> text from one console bleeds to another when you do a VC switch), and
>hopefully
>> fixed that in the latest kernel.
>
> Text bleeding? The problem I have been seeing is not text, but just random
> data on a VC switch. By random data, I mean that chunks of the screen may
> be filled with oddly colored random characters, saying that both the char
> byte and the color byte are stepped on. A ^L clears that up fast.
>
> Of course, that is usually an indicator of an upcoming
> crash (So far, once I start seeing that, it will oops or panic or
> something very soon) so it may just be something tramping on something
> elses space. (and, at 32k per vc, it has a lot of space to tramp on. :-)
>
>
Yes, console bleeding was a problem when it came to system messages.
For example, if you started an app that called the soundriver and got an
IRQ conflict message quite a few times you could switch VC's and not
get away from that message basically trashing the VC you switched to.
As for the console corruption crashing the system, this problem first
showed up and I reported it to the kernel list around 1.3.1(5-8) when
the default TERM setting in the kernel was changed from console to linux.
This change broke ncurses, causing some systems, including mine to crash
at random with the console corruption preceding each crash. It wasn't
until this january when I got a new computer that I was able to conclude
that my system setup wasn't the culprit because the same thins was happ
ening on my new computer with a different distribution then that of what
I was using before. Fortunately ncurses-1.9.8a was released back in Dece
mber so I got a copy of that and compiled it. Needless to say, once I got
the newer version installed my crashing problems went away.
Curtiss