Direct rendering causing lock ups?

[Paul Furness <paul.furness@vil.ite.mee.com>]

Hi.

I just (for various reasons) re-built my workstation from scratch, using
Red Hat 7.3 and then applying updates. 

After getting it all working nicely, I noticed that when I switch from X
to a text terminal (ctrl-alt-F1) and then back to X, the whole box
hangs. It won't allow telnet or ssh and I can't kill the X server
(ctrl-alt-BS) so the only fix is the 'Big Red Switch' solution.

After some messing around, and chatting to a friend who also found this
problem, we have come to the conclusion that it is related to DRI mode
Radeon configuration; if we turn on DRI, X is much faster but crashes
the box when switching VT. If we turn off DRI, no crash.

My questions:

1) Has anyone else seen this behavior? Is it restricted just to ATI
Radeon cards?
2) Does anyone know how to _stop_ this behavior? I'd really like to keep
DRI because of the speed, but I'd also really like to have a system that
lets me do what it's supposed to!

Any thoughts, anyone?

Paul.

-- 
Paul Furness

Systems Manager

2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2.