9.0 release hang in quiescent X

[Matthew Navarre]

On Aug 17, 2012, at 7:00 PM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 17 Aug 2012, Gary Aitken wrote:
> 
>> On 08/17/12 14:44, Warren Block wrote:
>> 
>>> If that stops the lockups, then you could try setting each in turn to a non-zero value (minutes).  Leave everything at zero except for the one being tested.  But these also seem unlikely, as it's a hardware signal from the video board to the monitor.  The suggestion of an X screensaver causing the lockup was excellent.  Even if you have no screensavers, there are other things that could be triggered, like xlock.
>> 
>> Not sure I understand what you're getting at.  By "other things that could be triggered" what do you mean?  e.g. xclock obviously gets "triggered" at least once per minute; you're suggesting that event could be causinging an update request while blanked out that is causing trouble?
> 
> Other long-term events that happen might be to blame, not related to screen blanking at all.  For example, a cron job.

Just as a data point, I had the same thing happen on PC-BSD 9.0. The system would hang after just a couple minutes of inactivity, but would wake up again on keyboard input. Top showed X.org taking 100% of CPU and load averages got up to some seriously ridiculous levels. The workaround I found was to turn off the "Dim Screen" option in KDE. Never filed a bug report, since I didn't know if it was FreeBSD, PC-BSD or X.org.

OK,
MCN