X becomes unresponsive with nvidia and hardlocks with gdb (was Re: X becomes unresponsive with nvidia / xscreensaver and desktop panics)

[Garrett Cooper]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>> Thanks for the tips Doug -- I'll give them a shot of course...
>>
>> Glad I could help. The one thing I forgot to mention is to try the
>> nvidia-settings app if you have not already done so. There are various
>> things there that you can tweak that might yield better results.
>>
>> Doug
>
>    I did in fact set everything up via nvidia-settings. I'm running
> some stress tests right now to see whether or not I can simulate the
> issue -- it doesn't appear to be as straightforward as I thought..
> -Garrett
>

I believe my actual problem with panicking is related to gdb, not X11.
So the actual problem is two-fold:

- X11 livelocks, where I can login via ssh and kill .
- When I use gdb -p, it prints out the same message reported here:
<http://osdir.com/ml/gdb.bugs.discuss/2005-04/msg00043.html>. The only
thing is that if I press `y' on the first go-around, the machine
hardlocks on the first try with hitting `y'. If I hit `n' so gdb
coredumps, I can either go on my merry way, or go back to the
confirmation dialog. If I hit it again, it doesn't hardlock. It does
hardlock though, and for whatever reason my PC speaker beeps, and I
have to warm boot it. I haven't been able to get a kernel dump though,
so something else mysteriously is going on that I can't track.

So, just to simplify:

first_try := True

while gdb is running:
    if prompt_for_coredump() and first_try is True:
        panic()
    first_try := False

Thanks,
-Garrett