This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: Opinions From: Steve Borho <steve@borho.myip.org> Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 14:11:56 -0600 On Wed, Jan 12, 2000 at 08:46:18PM +0100, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer wrote: > On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, Bill Carlson wrote: > > > I can see you haven't had this happen to you. The keyboard is gone, the > > mouse is gone, the display is toast. Trust me, I fiddled with this for > > quite a while, upgrading to a new release of XFree86 made the problem go > > away. You can kill the X server all you want, the trick is to get > > something to tell the card to do back to text mode! > > Using SVGATextMode to switch to graphics mode and back should do the > trick. Since the X server runs as root and directly talks to the hardware, it can cripple your machine just as effectively as any miscreant kernel driver. I've had buggy Xserver/video card combinations lock up machines hard many a time. Once your video card decides to lock up your PCI bus, there's not much you can do about it but remove power for a few seconds. It's the price you pay for commodity hardware. It's always been my experience that Linux is as reliable as your hardware. With PC's, this isn't saying much (which explains why I use a DEC Alpha and a Netwinder at home). In some applications, being as reliable as the hardware is not good enough (some engineering jobs require processes to run for weeks on end and it would be unforgivable to loose a weeks worth of computation because your power supply or network card croaked). For most of us, though, it's perfectly fine. ===