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

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 1:37 AM, Doug Barton <dougb_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> 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

Thanks for the tips Doug -- I'll give them a shot of course...
-Garrett