XFree86 3.3 - SVGA server broken?

[msz sirius astrouw edu pl (Michal Szymanski)]

Hi everybody,

I have just upgraded several PC to Redhat 4.2 Linux and also to
XFree86 3.3 at the same time.

I have a few types of ET4000 SVGA cards all of which worked fine under
old XFree86 ver 2.X. Now it looks like one particular type of video
cards works in a very weird way. Starting the server causes the colors
to become very dark, blue and green. No red or yellow can be seen on the
screen. After exiting from X11 the text on the console becomes green and
there is no way (at least I could not found it) to make it white again
(except reboot ;-). Even invoking 'dosemu' (which makes kind of the
video reset, and displays normal white on black characters) does not
help. After going back to unix prompt the text is green again. 

At first I thought there was something wrong with the card but when I
installed new X/Linux on the second computer equipped with the same type
of card I found the same behavior. I downgraded XFree86 back to 3.2 and it
works just fine now! So it must be something wrong with the SVGA server.
The card itself is quite old, Taiwan made but it is even capable (under
DOS/Windoze at least) of displaying in 32k HiColor mode. One of the
reason I upgraded to XFree86 3.3 was that I read in some announcement
that the new SVGA server supports HiColor on some cards ;-)))

The other thing I noticed is the performance. I found X11 starting very
slooowly. At first I suspected it was an effect of new configuration
(/usr/X11R6 is mounted by NFS from a remote host, only the server itself
is copied to the local directory), but after downgrading do 3.2 I found
it working almost twice as fast!!! (in terms of the time elapsed since
'startx' command to opening of the last window on the X11 screen).
I made this test a few times on a machine which has SVGA card working in
both 3.2 and 3.3 version so this is not a question of disk buffers etc.

It would be interesting to hear if anybody has experienced similar
problems.

with regards,

Michal.

P.S. BTW, downgrading XFree do the older version using 'rpm' is NOT an
easy task. And doing this on a machine having /usr NFS-mounted is even
worse ;-(

****************************************************************************
  Michal Szymanski                    Internet: msz sirius astrouw edu pl
  Warsaw University Observatory       Bitnet:   msz plwauw61 bitnet
  Al. Ujazdowskie 4                   Voice:    48-22-6294011 ext 23
  00-478 Warszawa, POLAND             FAX:      48-22-6294967
****************************************************************************