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

On Wed, 7 Jan 2009, Garrett Cooper wrote:

> Hello folks,
> 	As many probably know, I recently installed FreeBSD 8-CURRENT on 
> my desktop.

Why would we know that? I mean good for you, but seriously ... :)

> 	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.

No solutions, but a few general comments. First, I know that the author of 
xscreensaver has put a lot of work into dual head stuff, and also that it 
creates a lot of problems, so you're not alone here. If you get any 
conclusive evidence that xscreensaver is at fault you should contact him 
at http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/bugs.html

A few things you can try to narrow it down .... first try turning off the 
xscreensaver daemon and just run one of the screensaver programs full 
screen for a while to see if that causes the crash. It's also worth 
testing GL vs. non-GL screensavers. I had a problem with GL stuff for a 
while that was fixed by an nvidia driver update a few versions ago.

You should probably also try running with just the nv driver and see if 
that causes the same crash.

Finally, you might try setting debug.debugger_on_panic=0 in 
/etc/sysctl.conf if you don't have it already. That will cause panics to 
go directly to dumping which is useful if you're in X.


hth,

Doug

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