Comment 6 for bug 63905

This problem has been reported in Red Hat bugzilla by numerous people over
the last 4 months or so, and is present on x86, x86_64, and ppc builds, so
it is presumed to be a general problem not constrained to any particular
architecture.

In all cases reported so far, using Option "swcursor" or one of its many
synonyms, works around the issue.

Recently, a user has reported that disabling rhgb (Red Hat graphical boot),
allows the X server to start up and the hardware cursor works fine. Another
user worked around the problem by booting into runlevel 3, and then logging
in as root and typing "init 5". After that, the nv driver worked fine
and did not have hardware cursor problems.

Anyone experiencing this problem on any distribution, should attempt one
of these workarounds as well to see if it works.

Both of these workarounds essentially causes rhgb to be bypassed, so rhgb
appears to be the catalyst which makes this bug appear. For those who
are not familiar with rhgb, it is essentially a graphical shell around
boot time init startup, which is essentially eye-candy init. rhgb starts
up an X server with DRI disabled as soon as possible in the init sequence,
so that the remainder of the init can proceed graphically inside X. The
X server that is started, is started in a minimal environment where the
hard disk is read-only, etc.

Once the system has started up, rhgb starts a second X server, which is
the real X server the user will be using, and then kills the minimal X
server it was running with.

As such, there is a small window of time, in which 2 X servers can actually
be running at the same time on different VCs, and this may bring video
driver bugs or X server bugs to the surface which would not ever happen
if only a single X server were running.

It would appear that the "nv" video driver in this case, does not start up
correctly if another X server has been started already, however it is not
clear what exactly the problem is yet.

- This particular bug is reported by a Yellowdog user, indicating that it is
  a clone of Fedora Core 2. Does Yellowdog also use rhgb, and if so, if you
  disable rhgb, does the problem go away?

- Are any other users out there of other distributions able to reproduce this
  problem?

- Using another OS, or having removed rhgb in a Red Hat system, can any user
  using "nv" reproduce this problem manually, by starting an X server, then
  switching VTs and starting a second X server on :1?

Hopefully this information will be useful in tracking down the cause of the
problem in the nv driver. In the mean time, until a solution is found and
committed to CVS, users experiencing the problem are recommended to only use
a single X server at a time, and to disable rhgb or any similar software
until a solution can be found - or alternatively to continue using swcursor
to avoid the issue.

Hope this helps.