High CPU usage for hald(8) as of r188749

On my laptop, after building CURRENT (r188749) this morning, it seems
that hald(8) is using a bit more CPU than its proper share:

last pid:  2203;  load averages:  1.27,  1.10,  0.63    up 0+00:12:14  13:04:12
60 processes:  2 running, 58 sleeping
CPU: 19.1% user,  0.0% nice, 78.2% system,  2.7% interrupt,  0.0% idle
Mem: 78M Active, 18M Inact, 47M Wired, 376K Cache, 26M Buf, 1351M Free
Swap: 6144M Total, 6144M Free

  PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
 1734 haldaemon     1 118    0 19968K  5160K RUN      6:57 97.17% hald
 2203 david         1  46    0  6352K  4492K select   0:00  0.20% ssh
 1806 root          1  44    0 91156K 77684K select   0:04  0.00% Xorg
 1917 david         1  44    0  3672K  2928K select   0:04  0.00% piewm
...

FreeBSD g1-37.catwhisker.org. 8.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #955 r188749: Wed Feb 18 09:28:21 PST 2009     root_at_g1-37.catwhisker.org.:/common/S4/obj/usr/src/sys/CANARY  i386

Possible complication(s) in this include:

* I built hald(8) under RELENG_6.  This is because

* I build all ports (save for misc/compat6x) under RELENG_6, and update
  ports daily.  The laptop spends enough of its time rebuilding software
  just tracking RELENG_6, RELENG_7, HEAD, and ports under RELENG_6 every
  day; if I tried updating the ports under RELENG_7 & HEAD, too, the
  task would often take more than 24 hrs. per day.

The machine is an older Dell Latitude C840 (single-core 2.4 GHz)
laptop; nothing especially remarkable about it.

Booting:

FreeBSD g1-37.catwhisker.org. 6.4-STABLE FreeBSD 6.4-STABLE #669 r188436: Tue Feb 10 04:23:24 PST 2009     root_at_g1-35.catwhisker.org:/common/S1/obj/usr/src/sys/CANARY  i386

hald(8)'s CPPU usage is down in the noise, even when the system is nearly
completely idle.

My recollection is that hald(8) was also a low CPU-usage task for
RELENG_7.

I have done nothing with respect to configuring or tweaking hald(8); the
high CPU usage appears to be a new artifact since yesterday (when I ran
r188709).

I note, too, that if I boot CURRENT while I have a Cisco/Aironet
350 (an(4)) card inserted in one of the PCcard slots, in addition
to hald(8) consuming CPU, the only things to which the keyboard
responds are chords to switch among vtys and Ctl+Alt+Esc to go to
the debugger -- Ctl+Alt+Del is ignored, and xdm(1) doesn't start.
Ensuring that the an(4) card is not in the syystem avoids the issue,
and xdm(1) comes up fine.  (Well, I admit to having taken some
evasive action when X.org started wanting to use hald(8) && modified
my start-up script for xdm, but I haven't changed that in a couple
of days.)

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david_at_catwhisker.org
Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.