This is a fault of the wscons driver under NetBSD. wscons is not taking a
good enough snapshot of *all* the VGA and extended VGA registers and other
necessary state.

Luke Mewburn (lukem@netbsd.org) can reliably replicate this issue using his
Dell laptop, which IIRC has an ATI video adapter. It causes purple text
splotches on his 1600x1400 LCD display.

Andrew

Matthias Scheler wrote:
> after importing XFree86 4.1.0 into NetBSD's X11 sources at the weekend
> there have been reports about problems to restore the palette on systems
> using all kind of NVidia boards. As a result of this problem the screen
> stays black if the X11 server quits or you switch to a text console while
> it is running. AFAIK this problem shows up under FreeBSD, too.
> Is this a know problem with "nv" driver? Does it happen under Linux, too?