9.0 release not dead but barely breathing after idling

[Thomas Mueller]

from Gary Aitken <freebsd at dreamchaser.org>:

> Aargh...
> So my 9.0 RELEASE system no longer totally hangs when sitting idle...
> it seems to run quite a bit longer, waking up from screen blanking in general
> even after long (overnight) periods of sitting idle.  However, not always.

> X (screen was allowed to blank after 10 min, I'm testing w/ that off now.)
> blanked the screen.
> I come back after a few hrs of the system doing nothing (leaving a lot of stuff open, esp in firefox) and the screen is blank (expected) but doesn't wake up.

> I can ping from another machine, but not rlogin (no response).
> That seems weird.
> /var/log/messages shows no activity around attempted rlogin time
> Previously, before I turned off memory hole mapping in bios,
> it would go totally dead, but now it's clearly breathing.
> Power switch doesn't do a soft reboot,
> but I haven't tested it independently to see if it works at all.
> Will do that on next reboot.

> Question:

(snip)

I had a problem roughly like yours with 9.0-RELEASE, with a mystery hang after running
cvs up -dP
in a NetBSD pkgsrc tree

and a mystery reboot after long idleness where the uptime was about 48 hours.

That mystery reboot happened when I was only a few feet away (one or two meters?), in the same room, within hearing distance of the sounds, so I was able to attend to the reboot, what the computer booted into.

Also, I have Intel Sandy Bridge system and had read that I needed to upgrade to STABLE or HEAD to get the graphics updates.

So I switched from RELENG_9_0 (9.0-RELEASE + patches) to RELENG_9 (STABLE), without asking on the emailing list, and that solved the problem.

Tom