This problem happend with my i128 chip (NVidia) under NetBSD 1.5 too. The
palette got darker after the first start and black after the second one.
I fixed the problem playing around with ramdac settings, perhaps you try this
... but that cannot be a true 'fix' of the problem.

The problem doesn't only appear with the 4.x version, but also with the
original X version that comes with 1.5

I once tried under FreeBSD and the problem didn't appear, but perhaps display
settings were a bit different there, so this might be wrong.

-Flo

Andrew van der Stock wrote:

> 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?