In vesa.ko there is a function that gets called when resuming from sleep, e.g. at resuming after S3 suspend via 'zzz'. This function does a BIOS call, which is related to restoring the graphics cards' previous state it had before powering off. On Nvidia cards this BIOS function seems to be implemented in a different way than on most other cards. For this reason, calling this BIOS function causes the Nvidia graphics driver to hang, failing to resume. (For technical background, read my discussion with jkim in PR 224069: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=224069 ) Reproducing the bug is easy: -Install FreeBSD (eg using GENERIC kernel). -Enable sc (kern.vty="sc" in /boot/loader.conf). -Install xorg. Install and configure nvidia driver. Reboot and start xorg via startx. -Enter "zzz" in a xterm. -Watch the system/driver hang, keyboard (PS/2) and mouse becoming unresponsive when attempting to switch back to graphics mode. -Hitting the power button results no visible change, until after timeout a message about an unresponsive stop job (presumably the nvidia driver) appears shortly before powering off. For reproducing the bug it is essential to use GENERIC kernel! Because, working around by building and installing a custom kernel without "options VESA" fixes the hang after suspend/resume. It is also important to not have vt and its helper modules (vt_efifb etc) in the kernel, as these pull in the vesa.ko showstopper module. Already back in 2017 I found that skipping (commenting out) the Nvidia BIOS call fixes the issue, making resume work reliably. So I believe the proper fix would be: 1. check whether the graphics card is Nvidia 2. if it is Nvidia, skip that BIOS call in /usr/src/sys/dev/fb/vesa.c line 520. Pseudocode for a patch might look like this: (+)if (! nvidia_card_is_installed) { x86bios_intr(®s, 0x10); (+)} Side note: All my systems use the sc console, not the vt console. So I do not know the system behaviour when using vt. Thus please use sc in text mode when reproducing the bug!