NMI watchdog stability

[Jonathan Lundell <linux@lundell-bros.com>]

Back in March 2001, Keith Owens wrote and Andrew Morton replied:
At 4:47pm -0700 9/18/02, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
>  >
>>  Am I the only person who is annoyed that nmi watchdog is now off by
>>  default and the only way to activate it is by a boot parameter? You
>>  cannot even patch the kernel to build a version that has nmi watchdog
>>  on because the startup code runs out of the __setup routine, no boot
>>  parameter, no watchdog.
>
>It was causing SMP boxes to crash mysteriously after
>several hours or days. Quite a lot of them. Nobody
>was able to explain why, so it was turned off.

This was in the context of 2.4.2-ac21. More of the thread,with no 
conclusive result, can be found at 
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0103.2/0906.html

Was there any resolution? Was the problem real, did it get fixed, and 
is it safe to turn on the local-APIC-based NMI ticker on a 2.4.9 SMP 
system? (I'm stuck with 2.4.9, actually Red Hat's 2.4.9-31, for 
external reasons.) What was the nature of the mysterious crashes?

Thanks.
-- 
/Jonathan Lundell.