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[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

I wrote to one of the FreeDOS developers with my "bug report" regarding
memory mgmt programs in FreeDOS interfering with Xvesa once one boots to
Linux using loadlin.  He, in turn, submitted it to the right people (those
maintaining/developing memory mgmt progs, I assume) and, as I was afraid
he might, asked for further testing.  Don't know when/if I'll have time 
for such testing--he wanted to know which of the two, or whether both, 
case the problem, and what error message Xvesa gives.  If anyone cares to 
test this more, please submit feedback on it, which I will then forward to 
the FreeDOS people.  Otherwise, that'll have to wait until I can find some 
time to devote to it.

Finally, let me just include a bit of information this developer gave in 
response to my bug report, in case it might be interesting to those 
facing this memory mgmt problem:

Eric Auer <eric AT CoLi.Uni-SB.DE> wrote:

Hi James, forwarding to Tom and Michael, maybe they have a comment...

<snip>

Please distinguish HIMEM+EMM386 from only HIMEM. The former involves
mapping, and it might happen that the memory area for the VESA framebuffer
is not explicitly mapped by EMM386 by default. Instead, it might expect
DOS programs (e.g. games) to request such mapping manually. LOADLIN does
not ask for special mapping by itself. If you only load HIMEM and still
have problems, the background could be either A20 handling (low probability,
as the rest of Linux works okay for you) or some hooked interrupts. With
MEMTEST86+ (www.memtest.org) I fount that it is a problem that HIMEM hooks
int 15 (and so does EMM386 and even MKEYB)...: MEMTEST asks int 15 for the
installed memory size and memory map, and uses int 15 for APM power mgmt
control. HIMEM changes the reported memory map, and more importantly it
might get overwritten by MEMTEST before getting called, so int 15 would hang.

There is no well-defined interface to uninstall HIMEM or EMM386 completely,
but LOADLIN seems to do its best, otherwise it would not be able to load
Linux while DOS memory management is loaded.

Please give some more details, like contents of your config / autoexec and
the exact error message from Xvesa (plus later, on demand, some contents of
/proc status information and other log files as needed...).