Re: nmi_watchdog default setting on i386 and x86_64

[Mikael Pettersson]

Mike Mason writes:
 > Does anybody know the reasoning behind having nmi_watchdog turned off by 
 > default on i386 and on by default on x86_64.  I've heard that i386 had 
 > problems with false positives in the past, but that local apic watchdog 
 > may make that concern obsolete.

On i386 the problems are mainly hardware and BIOS. In particular,
lots of Dell laptops have capable hardware but broken BIOSen that
hang the machines if we try to enable anything sending performance
counter interrupts via the local APIC.

/Mikael
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