>> Some of you are very lucky. You can telnet in and fix the video.
>> For other people, "fix the video" requires a _hard_ reboot.
>
> No it doesn't.
> Try the joystick reboot daemon.
How can I make this clear...
The video board hardware crashes. I can get back my keyboard
with the SysRq key. Then I can run restoretextmode (different
garbage), start X again (different garbage), reboot and let
the BIOS play with things (different garbage), start Windows NT
(different garbage)...
The joystick reboot daemon would only give me a software reboot.
That won't do. It leaves me with a very strange video mode:
Imagine a graphics mode with about 90x25 resolution. There are
only 4 colors on the screen, just like CGA. The pixels flicker
like candles.
Sorry, user-space hacks _won't_ fix the crash. Even if the
joystick trick worked (it does not), "just reboot" is not
the Linux way I hope.
You can only reset the video card if you know the current
internal state. Video boards overload registers by putting
a read-only and write-only register at the same address.
This means that the board can not be reset except by the
software that was using it. GGI solves this.
Now I'm sure you will all want a Cirrus Logic video board...