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

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Andrew Reilly
<andrew-freebsd_at_areilly.bpc-users.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 12:00:46AM +0100, O. Hartmann wrote:
>> Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> > On Jan 8, 2009, at 12:36 AM, Roman Divacky wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 11:49:26PM -0800, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> >>>     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.
>
> Straight up: I can't help with this particular OP's quesiton,
> just have a comment, further down.
>
>> I have and I had the same in FreeBSD 7.0/7.1 and now with 8.0-CUR with
>> both a NV8600GTS and an older NV6800GT. A very old NV6600 never showed
>> up these lockings when I used that PCIe-Card with FreeBSD 7.0/7.1, but
>> I'm not sure. The locks came spontanous, sometimes after heavy usage of
>> 'mplayer', but sometimes instantanously after the destop showed up.
>>
>> On those boxes, there is no Linux emulation and no Linux BLOB (useless,
>> due to 64 Bit). I swapped the 'nv' driver on all FreeBSD boxes with
>> 'vesa', because there is another issue with sprites/graphics buffers
>> many times reported using FireFox.
>
> I have had terrible trouble with an NV6800 card on my AMD64
> machine and a 1600x1200 LCD display.  I mostly had to use the
> vesa driver, becauase sometimes the nv driver would just fail
> to initialize the card properly, and it would be just black,
> or wrong frequencies/jumbled: it was a mess.  Vesa worked,
> but generally didn't let me go beyond 1280x1024.  When nv was
> (occasionally) working I had the firefox bug surface.
>
> I've commented about this on the lists (and on usenet) before,
> so I thought that I'd better also mention, for the record, that
> I have completely solved the problem by replacing that card with
> an inexpensive ATI card that the radionhd driver recognizes as
> "RV635" based.  Should have done it long ago...  Everything
> appears to work perfectly, now.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Andrew

Ok, well given the feedback (what I was kind of fishing for), I'll
gladly start talking to some nVidia folks about reproducing these
issues and bugfixing their driver.

Another datapoint: when it doesn't lock up, Xorg dies mysteriously
after some hours use.

I'm running XFCE4, but I'm wondering a) what desktops folks are
running that have had issues, and b) what the configurations are. That
way we can better tie down the problem at hand.

Replacing my 8800GTS with a lower grade nVidia card isn't going to cut
it -- I don't like workarounds that cost most money and create more
spare hardware that I don't use :).

Thanks!
-Garrett