Odd Intel KMS behavior when attempting X restart

[Kevin Oberman]

This may prove to be of no value, but it might tickle some ideas, so I am
posting an almost data free problem. Sorry.

Yesterday I made a small mistake and mounted a device (Kindle) in s
directory gamin was monitoring so that I could not unmount it. I thought I
would just logout of Gnome, ssh in from my phone, unmount the device, and
"startx". Seemed reasonable and not different from other X11 restarts in
the current syscons world.

My enviroment: FreeBSD 9-stable r256657 on a Lenovo T520 Thinkpad without
Optimus. Running WITH_NEW_XORG and WITH_KMS.

I logged out of Gnome. Screen blanked, as usual. While I was busy elsewhere
(logging into my system from my phone is a bit tedious), the screen
suddenly flashes fo display a bunch of diagonal lines, mostly red with a
few white pixels. Wha???

As soon as I pressed a key, the console appeared complete with my shell
prompt! I was back to a functioning vty. As far as I know, this is simply
not possible, but I it happened. I entered a few commands and everything
seemed "normal", so I tried starting Gnome. No joy, The screen blanked, but
I never got a cursor or anything else. Used my network connection to enter
a shutdown and rebooted.

Any idea how this could have happened? While I'm looking forward to newcons
to get vtys working again, it looks like something timing out, probably
screensaver, managed to trigger a reset of the graphics and get a
functioning display. It's ALMOST like syscons could be made to work with
Intel KMS.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com