For well over a year I've been complaining about sporadic hangs with X, where the mouse cursor would get stuck bouncing between two screens. I've suspected blame on the part of the nVidia driver, the mouse driver, and even the FreeBSD USB stack. Today I got a message from Andrew Hout telling me that the bug had been identified and fixed. Only two weeks ago, as shown by this bug report, which includes a very good summary of the problem, which was in the nVidia driver after all. The latest version was released only earlier this week. And of course it had nothing to do with FreeBSD, as evidenced by the other reports on the web.
So: installed the new driver with portupgrade, which conveniently didn't load the new driver. There's an issue there: since this is a kernel module, it's difficult to know which version is loaded. The information is there, but you need to know where. In my case, after loading the new driver, it reports (at line 100):
The other way to check is with kldstat, which isn't very informative at that level:
=== root@eureka (/dev/pts/10) /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver 16 -> kldstat
Id Refs Address Size Name
1 68 0xffffffff80200000 1150028 kernel
2 3 0xffffffff81351000 48498 linux.ko
3 1 0xffffffff8139a000 3cc40 snd_hda.ko
4 2 0xffffffff813d7000 76c90 sound.ko
5 1 0xffffffff8144e000 17d0 accf_http.ko
6 1 0xffffffff81450000 122f0 ahci.ko
7 1 0xffffffff81463000 b088 siis.ko
8 1 0xffffffff8146f000 10ae540 nvidia.ko
9 3 0xffffffff8251e000 4f068 vboxdrv.ko
10 1 0xffffffff8256e000 5570 atapicam.ko
11 1 0xffffffff82612000 3dfa linprocfs.ko
12 2 0xffffffff82616000 2931 vboxnetflt.ko
13 2 0xffffffff82619000 87b2 netgraph.ko
14 1 0xffffffff82622000 1579 ng_ether.ko
15 1 0xffffffff82624000 3f8a vboxnetadp.ko
16 1 0xffffffff82628000 2a369 nfsd.ko
17 3 0xffffffff82653000 10ce7 nfscommon.ko
18 1 0xffffffff82664000 31d3d nfscl.ko
After unloading and reloading the driver, however, the size changes, and it moves to the end of the list, leaving the previous slot (8) empty:
9 3 0xffffffff8251e000 4f068 vboxdrv.ko
...
19 1 0xffffffff82696000 a0fb17 nvidia.ko
It's interesting that it's smaller than the old version.