Re: [PATCH v3] watchdog: touch_nmi_watchdog should only touchlocal cpu not every one

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Wed Nov 10 2010 - 10:11:26 EST


On Wed, 10 Nov 2010 08:49:41 +0100 Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> * Don Zickus <dzickus@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > I ran into a scenario where while one cpu was stuck and should have panic'd
> > because of the NMI watchdog, it didn't. The reason was another cpu was spewing
> > stack dumps on to the console. Upon investigation, I noticed that when writing to
> > the console and also when dumping the stack, the watchdog is touched.
> >
> > This causes all the cpus to reset their NMI watchdog flags and the 'stuck' cpu
> > just spins forever.
>
> Hm, the flip side is that if a CPU is stuck spewing backtraces, we will now make all
> the other CPUs a lot more noisy - which might only 'lock up' because this CPU is
> stuck spewing oopses, right?
>
> Andrew, what would be your preference?
>

I saw you were cc'ed and felt rather pleased that I wouldn't have to
decide ;)

I guess the NMI really is a cpu-local concept rather than a
machine-wide one. And touch_nmi_watchdog() says "this CPU isn't
stuck", rather than "this CPU and all those others aren't stuck", yes?
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