Re: Catching NForce2 lockup with NMI watchdog

From: Richard B. Johnson
Date: Tue Dec 16 2003 - 08:58:04 EST


On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:

> On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, George Anzinger wrote:
>
> > > Hmm, you could have simply asked... ;-) Anyway, an inclusion is doable,
> > > I guess.
> >
> > I suspect I did, but most likey the wrong place. In any case, I would like to
> > think that "read the source, Luke" is the right answer.
>
> Certainly it is, but not necessarily the only one. ;-)
>
> > So, while I am in the asking mode, is there a simple way to turn off the PIT
> > interrupt without changing the PIT program? I would like a way to stop the
> > interrupts AND also stop the NMIs that it generates for the watchdog. I suspect
> > that this is a bit more complex that it would appear, due to how its wired.
>
> Well, in PC/AT compatible implementations, the counter #0 of the PIT has
> its gate hardwired to active, so you cannot mask the PIT output itself.
> So the only other choices are either reprogramming the counter to a mode
> that won't cause periodic triggers (which is probably the easiest way, but
> you don't want to do that for some purpose, right?) or reprogramming
> interrupt controllers not to accept interrupts arriving from the PIT.
>
> Note that Linux may behave strangely then. ;-)
>

Masking OFF the timer channel 0 in the interrupt controller
is probably the easiest thing to do. The port is read-write,
and the OCW default to having it accessible.

movw $0x21, %dx # Controller 0, mask register
inb %dx, %al # Get mask
orb $1, %al # Mask off bit 0
outb %al, %dx # Write it back

You can reenable by:

movw $0x21, %dx
inb %dx, %al
andb $~1, %al
outb %al, %dx

With port numbers less that 256, you actually don't need the
DX register but I forget if the AT&T assembler needs a $ before
the port number when doing this.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.22 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
Note 96.31% of all statistics are fiction.


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