Re: 2.6.30-rc1 - nmi_watchdog broken?

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Ed Tomlinson <edt@aei.ca> wrote:

> On Tuesday 14 April 2009 04:42:32 Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > 
> > * Ed Tomlinson <edt@aei.ca> wrote:
> > 
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > I've been having fun finding bugs in 30-rc1.  One of them is a 
> > > hard freeze.  I've not seen this type of problem on this hardware 
> > > before 30-rc1 - so I doubt if its hardware.  The best way I know 
> > > to debug a hard hang is with the nmi_watchdog.  I just cannot get 
> > > it to work.
> > 
> > [ Btw., have you tried CONFIG_PROVE_LOCKING=y - does it produce
> >   anything before or at the hard lockup point? ]
> > 
> > > The system is a 3 core amd cpu on a 790gx chipset.
> > > 
> > > If I boot the nmi_watchdog=1 it complains that lapci is not 
> > > available and the boot stops.  Same problem if I change the 
> > > clocksource to tsc, If I disable highres timers it panics.  If I 
> > > use nmi_watchdog=2 it panics. Am I doing something wrong or have I 
> > > hit a bug?
> > > 
> > > Logs of boots with and without highres timers inlined below.
> > 
> > hm, nmi_watchdog=1 acting funny is not unheard of. But 
> > nmi_watchdog=2 should really work. How does it panic, do
> > you have a capture of that?
> 
> I had not tried nmi_watchdog=2 highres=off.  This works.  Looks 
> like there is a conflict between highres timers and nmi_watchdog 
> here.

yes. Both use a limited resource of the lapic so we get one or the 
other.

( Might be fixable once we migrate the NMI watchdog code over to 
  perfcounters. )

	Ingo