X becomes unresponsive with nvidia / xscreensaver and desktop panics

[Roman Divacky]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 11:49:26PM -0800, 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.
> Thanks,

the nvidia driver keeps my 8-current crashing/deadlocking when playing video
quite often (once a week?). I have no idea what it causes.

the code of the driver seems to be done in 5.x times. I believe it needs
some rehashing as it might not get the semantics of "things" in 8.x right