When installing the system if it incorrectly sets up xorg.conf
the xwindows system will fail and the system will be useless
without the user logging in and manually mucking with the
configuration.

Any program listed on a "respawn" line of /etc/inittab will cause the "respawning too quickly" error message and will cycle the broken
x daemon endlessly.

I suggest removing the respawn setting for this daemon until after it runs successfully the first time. The first time it runs it should detect the failure
and offer to reset to a config file that might work. Ideally it should walk the
user through testing settings until it finds one that works.

My system would not autodetect the video card correctly with r5f1:

[mythtv@mythtv ~]$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 [KT400/KT600 AGP] Host Bridge
(rev 80)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416)
MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
00:0b.0 Multimedia video controller: Internext Compression Inc iTVC16 (CX23416)
MPEG-2 Encoder (rev 01)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/
C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:10.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller
(rev 81)
00:10.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller
(rev 81)
00:10.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller
(rev 81)
00:10.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller
(rev 81)
00:10.4 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 86)
00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T89
0 South]
00:11.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 A
C97 Audio Controller (rev 60)
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 78)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV15 [GeForce2 GTS/Pro] (r
ev a3)
[mythtv@mythtv ~]$

Is this really a KM improvement, or more generally, an xorg improvement? maybe an nVidia improvement?

I know this pops up here on the forum quite a bit but I always thought of it as an upstream problem.

Supposedly there's work going on with X.org that will default to a sensible resolution. In addition I believe theres work that Ubuntu is doing help on "Unbreakable X", though I think this related to the work that X.org is doing.
Xorg 7.3 is just out and the rate that it's being updated is quite incredible especially compared with the rate that XFree86 did. So we have one thing to thankful to Alex Terekhov for.

Bruce S.

_________________
Updated 2019/10/26: AthlonII X2 265 Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P
16Gb PC 1866 DDR3, 500GB+2TB+4TB SATA HDD,
SATA DVD-RW Asus DRW-24D5MT , NVIDIA GeForce GT1080
Hauppauage Nova-T 500, Nova-T LinHes R8.6.1