Re: X becomes unresponsive with nvidia / xscreensaver and desktop panics

Garrett Cooper wrote:
> Hello folks,
> 	As many probably know, I recently installed FreeBSD 8-CURRENT on my desktop.
> 	One of the things I'm noting is that when I use dual displays with
> the nvidia driver, and xscreensaver kicks in and keeps going for a
> period of time, the machine's X.org console eats up a core, and when I
> try and do anything like gdb Xorg, the system hangs, attempts to panic
> (I assume that's the case because I hear it beep and attempt to
> restart), then I have to give it a warm boot. truss(1)'ing Xorg showed
> that there were a lot of SIGALARM's being fired and masked.
>         This is incredibly reminiscent of the days when I used to run Linux and
> 	I forgot to configure my dump device (doh), but this problem appears
> to be easily reproducible with my environment. I'm fixing that issue
> right now, so I should have a working crashdump soon...
> 	Just wondering if anyone else has seen this issue, or if it's just me
> once again.
>   

I have been battling with the nvidia binary driver on HEAD for a long 
time.  I've got a Quadro NVS card:

vgapci0_at_pci0:1:0:0:     class=0x030000 card=0x019010de chip=0x018a10de 
rev=0xa2 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Nvidia Corp'
    device     = 'Quadro NVS with AGP 8x [NV18GL.2]'
    class      = display
    subclass   = VGA

and run the older port because the card support was yanked at some point:

nvidia-driver-96.43.07 NVidia graphics card binary drivers for hardware 
OpenGL ren

I run dual-dvi displays w/ xinerama.  I have not seen panics but I do 
see unacceptable performance.  The most obvious problems are impossible 
mouse and rendering lag.  I also see large memory consumption when 
running something like firefox w/ lots of hidden/off-screen images in a 
page (e.g. p4web).  I am now 100% certain the nvidia driver is at fault 
as I swapped in an ATI card over the holiday break and the change was 
like night and day.  Unfortunately the xrandr support for the ATI card 
was too busted to use so I gave up and stuck the nvidia card back in the 
box (for those that care the card is a Radeon 9600 and the problem is 
that after a while one display would blank randomly).

This is a dual-core AMD (i386) desktop but performance actually dropped 
when I went from UP to SMP which makes me believe there's something 
braindead in the nvidia driver.  The problems have only gotten worse as 
FreeBSD has evolved.

I've not replaced the video card because I need dual-dvi in an AGP 
format which is rare these days.  Moving to PCIE means a new mb/box 
which I'm trying to avoid.

    Sam