Hi all,

A few days ago I posted on port-alpha regarding a strange lockup condition
on my AlphaPC164SX running release 1.4. To recap, my console will
reproducibly freeze not respond to any further keyboard input if I use apps
like vi,less,more, etc. The symptoms are increasing console "garbage" on the
screen -- it basically looks like the letters are falling off my screen a la
"The Matrix". =) Or maybe a better example is the Letter Invaders game from
Marvin Bacon Teaches Typing.. anyways, I digress. Essentially, after a few
screens of watching my screen fall apart, the console stops responding to
commands. It is quite reproducible.

I have a Matrox Millenium MGA card in the machine - it appears as vga0.
However, it doesn't seem to be limited to the console as of this morning; I
was logged in via telnet and ran

sup -v sup.conf

the -v made it produce lots of messages, and soon enough, my telnet window
was locked up solid too. Launching another telnet session and killing the
offending csh process didn't convince my telnet client that the connection
had been broken.

Ross Harvey did send me a patch on port-alpha to try to fix the problem (see
message header "console garbage/lockup", but as I reported on the list, that
didn't help either. Is there anything else I should try? I'm almost about to
just rip out the VGA card and start using a serial console, but now that my
telnet session also died, I wonder if I'll have the same problem on a serial
console.

-Edwin