Re: Timer interrupt stops, causes soft lockup

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:53:29 -0400
"Joel K. Greene" <joel.greene@catapult.com> wrote:

> We originally saw this on the SLED10 kernel - SuSE's version of
> 2.6.16.21 - where the issue would occur in a matter of weeks or
> months.

Hi,

this is roughly a 3 year old kernel; and the thing is, this code has been
revamped entirely several times since then. Do you see this behavior with,
say the 2.6.24 kernel? That's a twofold question, since it has with-tickless 
and without-tickless as option. (tickless doesn't tend to use the PIT at all
so would just avoid the entire issue; without-tickless still uses the PIT)

It's really better to use your support contract with Novell to get them to fix
it for SLE(S/D)10 if you are not in a position to test or diagnose with new
kernels; they're there to support you for their old kernel. In general, the folks
on this list are working on current kernels and don't tend to spend time working
on such old kernels. The probability of this bug being fixed since then, or the fix
being totally not applicable to current kernels, is quite high (given the several rewrites
of the timer code) so it'd be a waste of the time of the people on this list.

Now, if you can see the behavior on 2.6.24 (or better, the latest 2.6.25-rc), then
suddenly you'll find a lot more people who're going to be interested....


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