Savage card on a laptop

[Giuseppe Argentieri]

I installed X.org-6.8.2 through ports on a laptop equipped with a
Savage graphic card. At first I probed hardware with

# Xorg -configure

but

# Xorg -config /root/xorg.conf.new

leads to the hanging of the machine and a blank screen: no Xorg.0.log
in /var/log

Then I tried 'xorgconfig', giving in the same options used with
OpenBSD and Linux, which work very well. But the X server seems to be
unable to go up and hangs the machine whenever the "savage" driver is
used. So I changed "savage" with "vesa" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

With these settings X bootstraps but the only way to kill it avoiding
a total freeze is:

# pkill -9 X

Exiting from any window manager doesn't work. With pkill -9 X, the
display freezes and I can go back to the console with CTRL + ALT + F1
but here I find the screen somewhat corrupted. I'm able to interact
with the system only typing commands that I can see and rebooting the
machine!

I also found that this kind of corruption disappears if the kernel is
rebuilt with raster mode (options ...) and 800x600 resolution is used:

# vidcontrol -g 100x37 VESA_800x600

Now, I wish I could use the savage driver and a cleaner way to exit
from X without the brutal 'kill -9'

Any suggestions ?

-- 
http://swpat.ffii.org/

Giuseppe