• Roland Kletzing's avatar
    mdacon messing up default vc's - set default to vc13-16 again · 0b9cf3aa
    Roland Kletzing authored
    mdacon incorrectly detects MDA hardware on systems without such graphics card.
    
    One may load this module by chance, for example when doing some systematical
    module-testing, and if there is no Monochrome Display Adapter attached ,
    module init renders vc1-16 completely unusable.
    
    I and others have run into this more than once.  see [Bug 224522 - modprobe
    mdacon freezes machine -> https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=224522 ]
    for example
    
    Apparently  proper MDA detection seems to be broken for a long time - seems to
    be related to those #ifdef TEST_MDA_B statements added by Edward Betts.
    
    this commit back in 2002 made things even worse :
    http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git;a=commit;h=c72757b49c88914433244757fb4967fc63546685
    
    It changed default vc allocation from 13-16 to 1-16 for no apparent reason
    (!?) , and with that (and without X), mdacon grabs the vc you`re currently
    sitting on and locks you out.
    
    this is from Kconfig :
    >config MDA_CONSOLE
    >        depends on !M68K && !PARISC && ISA
    >        tristate "MDA text console (dual-headed) (EXPERIMENTAL)"
    >        ---help---
    >          Say Y here if you have an old MDA or monochrome Hercules graphics
    >          adapter in your system acting as a second head ( = video card). You
    >          will then be able to use two monitors with your Linux system. Do not
    >          say Y here if your MDA card is the primary card in your system; the
    >          normal VGA driver will handle it.
    
    As we can see mdacon is just meant as an additional driver for dual-head
    setup, and since kernel 2.4.36 still defaults to vc13-16 , setting the default
    back to that value again shouldn`t do any harm.
    
    Hereby i'm reverting that change, setting default back to to vc13-16 again.
    
    Besides the fact that mdacon may be rarely or never be used these days and
    could perhaps put to trash anyway (pre-dinosaur hardware!), indeed this is not
    a real solution, but at least it removes the unfortunate side-effect of
    messing up the vc you`re working on.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRoland Kletzing <devzero@web.de>
    Cc: James Simmons <jsimmons@infradead.org>
    Cc: "Antonino A. Daplas" <adaplas@pol.net>
    Cc: Tim Schmielau <tim@physik3.uni-rostock.de>
    Cc: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@gmx.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    0b9cf3aa
mdacon.c 13.8 KB