Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

>This looks like erase not working properly... This usually happens
>after switching back from X as X tends to leave some garbage in some
>engine registers, and is usually cured by switching to another console
>
Interesting, I hadn't even bothered to try X at this point, was using 
the console exclusively.  Giving X a whirl, I see what you mean - it 
leaves the screen an unreadable pixel soup upon return to console mode.  
Oddly though, in my case, neither switching consoles nor a gratuitous 
fbset had any effect (though I didn't try all that exhaustively).

>Since your problem seem to not depend on XFree, I suspect something
>else hairy is going on with the engine, I don't know what yet though,
>I'll try to find some clue.
>
OK, per request, output from 'dmesg' attached in its entirety.

The system is based around a Soltek SL75-DRV2 motherboard with an Athlon 
XP, VIA KT266A/8233 and one of the early-production clock-reduced Radeon 
8500LEE boards that were sold initially in Japan (if you believe the 
user-comments on the newegg.com website).

Thanks for investigating!
Kris



I wrote originally,

>Problem #1:  When scrolling, radeonfb fails to erase the portion of the
>> screen at the bottom, leaving all sorts of random pixels in the bottom
>> line.  Further scrolling propagates these pixels upwards.
>> See http://enterprise.bidmc.harvard.edu/~ktk/temp/radeonfb/screen-1.jpg
>> (Sorry for camera-shake; hand-held in dim room...)
>