Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 13 Dec 2003 00:16:20 -0500 (EST) | From | Bill Davidsen <> | Subject | Re: Catching NForce2 lockup with NMI watchdog |
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On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, bill davidsen wrote: > > > | In practice, assuming the MP IRQ routing information provided the BIOS has > > | been correct (which is not always the case), prerequisites #1 and #2 have > > | been met so far, but #3 has proved to be occasionally problematic. > > > > In practice many system seem to take a good bit of guessing and testing. > > I have an old P-II which only works with acpi=force and nmi_watchdog=2, > > for instance. > > Well, the NMI watchdog is a side-effect feature that works by chance > rather than by design. So you can't really complain it doesn't work > somewhere, although I wouldn't mind if new hardware was designed such that > it works. You shouldn't have to use "acpi=force" for the watchdog to work > though and for a PII system if "nmi_watchdog=1" doesn't work, then I > suspect a BIOS bug (set APIC_DEBUG to 1 in asm-i386/apic.h and send me the > bootstrap log and a dump from `mptable' for a diagnosis, if interested).
Has the check to see if the BIOS is old than very recent been removed? I used to get a message that the BIOS was too old, I believe that's what prompted the acpi to enable the local apic. Sorrt, I've been running that feature since 2.5.3x or so and I just carried it forward.
> > > It would be nice if there were a program which could poke at the > > hardware and suggest options which might work, as in eliminating the > > ones which can be determined not to work. Absent that trial and error > > rule, unfortunately. > > Linux has all appropriate bits to set up hardware reasonably as long as > BIOS provides accurate information. The only case our code fails is when > BIOS tells us lies and the there's little we can do about it. Actually we > are doing hardware manufacturers a favor we try to handle some cases at > all -- it's the BIOS that should be fixed instead and it is software and > it is stored in Flash memories these days, so there's no excuse. So if > there's a problem with running Linux because of BIOS bugs, then please > bugger the manufacturer in the first place (and avoid the company in the > future if they don't support Linux). > > Sometimes the NMI watchdog works in principle, but its activation leads > to system instability -- almost always this is a symptom of buggy SMM code > executed by the BIOS behind our back (NMIs are disabled by default in the > SMM, but careless code may enable them by accident).
Works fine for me, system stays up for 30-40 days when I let it... I also run softdog to catch hangs in user mode but not in the kernel. That also works.
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.
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