X becomes unresponsive with nvidia / xscreensaver and desktop panics

[Garrett Cooper]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Roman Divacky <rdivacky at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>> When the display got locked, sometimes I had the chance opening a ssh
>> session killing Xorg/xdm and restarting working, but by the end, that
>> was when changing towards 8.0-CUR, this 'trick' didn't work anymore. On
>> FBSD 7, Xorg was eating up 100% CPU time.
>
> exactly my situation. I noticed that when the machine stucks while starting
> X I am sometimes (~ 60%) able to ctrl-alt-backspace and it after some minutes
> kills the X (= some sort of livelock?), after that I can 100% start the X
> successfully...

    Mine doesn't happen boot -- it happens with the screensaver.
Interestingly enough though, it happens less when I use a single
screensaver instead of 2 separate screensavers. I'm going to put it
back to 2 separate random screensavers and see what happens...
-Garrett