I also have a VLB 5426, and an odd text resolution (100x48). I just
suffered my first crash (1.3.68) involving console corruption since,
ooh, sometime in the 1.3.20s. I also just reinstalled SVGATextMode,
which I haven't used since then.
Coincidence? Or is there perhaps something in console.c and friends
which objects to screens not being the same size as they were at
bootup? (it can't practically be an 80x25 assumption, as I spent the
intervening time using the BIOS 80x50 mode anyway). I used to be able
to make some 1.3.x (10<=x<=30) kernels crash quite quickly using
VT_RESIZE ioctls, I'll see if I can repeat this.
1.3.68 was up for 18 days or so on this machine. It had one screen
corruption of the `random coloured block' form the other day, and the
crash involved what looked like repeated panic messages scrolling up
th screen on some consoles and large colourful random things on
others. No EIPs for you to look at (I can't read _that_ fast ...),
and it rebooted spontaneously (I don't have the watchdog installed)
about twenty seconds later. It was under reasonable load (one
compilation, one autoconf) but I wasn't actually using the keyboard at
the time.
Of course I don't expect anyone to find a bug on the strength of this,
but if other people are having problems too, maybe we can look for
similarities. It'd be nice to think it wasn't a hardware problem.
Daniel
-- http://ftp.linux.org.uk/~barlow/, dan@detached.demon.co.uk, PGP key ID 5F263625``Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative'' --- Oscar Wilde