Bug 141034

Summary: NVIDIA Driver Fails to Return to Text Mode
Product: [openSUSE] SUSE LINUX 10.0 Reporter: Brian Sutin <novell>
Component: OtherAssignee: E-mail List <bnc-team-screening>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: SuSE Linux 10.0   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Customer Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Brian Sutin 2005-12-26 02:53:28 UTC 
Summary: on shutdown, NVIDIA driver does not return to text mode.

I installed SuSE 10.0 on my machine without problems.  Video is an on-motherboard GeForce 4MX Series video graphics processing unit.
I then loaded the patch to the NVIDIA video driver.  Afterwards, the
video worked fine except that when shutting down the machine, the
machine does not enter text mode.  Consequently, the screen becomes
an unreadable hash of red and green squares.
Comment 1 Brian Sutin 2005-12-27 17:37:14 UTC 
cntl-alt-F6 gives a blank screen.  The pty is still there, just invisible.  cntl-alt-F7 returns to graphics mode.
Comment 2 Martin Lasarsch 2006-01-02 16:21:06 UTC 
is it text mode or framebuffer? Have you tried vga=normal as bootparameter?
Comment 3 Michael Gross 2006-01-03 10:05:56 UTC 
Brian: Is there a chance that this oboard-chip uses shared memory? In that case, the BIOS of your board might be buggy and not reporting the correct amount of memory to the OS. With some NVIDIA-chips/configurations it is also a known problem that switching between fb and X causes problems. You might try to use the same resolution for X and the framebuffer, which sometimes solves this problem. If you're using shared memory graphics, you can use mem=...M as a boot append line to manually set the free memory of your system. Please note that the NVIDIA binary (closed source) driver cannot be supported directly by us. On the other hand, the support for the 440MX was terminated by NVIDIA AFAIK. Hope this helps you.
Comment 4 Brian Sutin 2006-01-03 15:52:27 UTC 
Setting vga=normal fixes the problem, although the framebuffer mode (I didn't
know that it was called that) has very a large, unsatisfying type size.  It was
vga=0x31a before.  I will try playing with the memory boot parameter next.
Thanks!
Comment 5 Brian Sutin 2006-01-04 02:53:59 UTC 
mem=2048M didn't help any.  Setting vga=0x31b rather than vga=0x31a did.  The trick seems to be matching the resolutions, including color, as you said.  Problem solved -- thanks!
Comment 6 Michael Gross 2006-01-04 07:06:08 UTC 
You're welcome. Closing this as fixed.