Re: Catching NForce2 lockup with NMI watchdog

From: George Anzinger
Date: Tue Dec 16 2003 - 16:54:35 EST


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


This is for the VST code where we want to stop the timer interrupts for a bit IF and only if we are in the idle task AND there are no timers to service, i.e. the interrupt would be useless. We don't want to mess with the PIT program as that would mess up the time when we turn it on again. So we just want to stop a few interrupts from time to time. We catch up after turning the PIT back on by using the TSC or pm_timer or some other source that keeps something close to reasonable time.


I see. Well, then disable_irq(0) may be the easiest way to do that for
the regular timer interrupt. For the NMI watchdog from the I/O APIC you'd
use disable_8259A_irq(0) and for one from the local APIC -- just mask the
APIC_LVTPC interrupt (there's no wrapper function, but that's easy).

How confusing :( Could you give me some idea how this works? I have tried disable_irq(0) and, as best as I can tell, it does not do the trick. The confusion I have is understanding where in the chain of hardware each of these thing is taking place.

For example, it would be "nice" if I could just turn off the PIT interrupt line so that both the NMI (PIT generated) and the PIT interrupt would be put on hold. Your answer seems to indicate that disable_irq() is working down stream from where the NMI signal is connected to the PIT interrupt line, so we need to turn of the NMI as well. A picture would be nice here :)



--
George Anzinger george@xxxxxxxxxx
High-res-timers: http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-res-timers/
Preemption patch: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/