Re: [PATCH] hardlockup: detect hard lockups without NMIs usingsecondary cpus

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 09:02:15AM -0500, Don Zickus wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 05:57:39PM -0800, Colin Cross wrote:
> > Emulate NMIs on systems where they are not available by using timer
> > interrupts on other cpus.  Each cpu will use its softlockup hrtimer
> > to check that the next cpu is processing hrtimer interrupts by
> > verifying that a counter is increasing.
> > 
> > This patch is useful on systems where the hardlockup detector is not
> > available due to a lack of NMIs, for example most ARM SoCs.
> 
> I have seen other cpus, like Sparc I think, create a 'virtual NMI' by
> reserving an IRQ line as 'special' (can not be masked).  Not sure if that
> is something worth looking at here (or even possible).

No it isn't, because that assumes that things like spin_lock_irqsave()
won't mask that interrupt.  We don't have the facility to do that.
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