Re: Catching NForce2 lockup with NMI watchdog

[Jesse Allen <the3dfxdude@hotmail.com>]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 11:11:39AM -0800, Allen Martin wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Mikael Pettersson [mailto:mikpe@csd.uu.se] 
> > Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 4:15 AM
> >
> >  > So does this confirm that the lockups with nforce2 
> > chipsets and apic
> >  > is actually a hardware problem after all? 
> > 
> > Confirm with very high probability. There may be quirks in nVidia's
> > chipset that we (unlike their Windoze drivers) don't know about.
> > 
> > Ask nVidia for detailed chipset documentation. Then maybe we 
> > can fix this.
> 
> NVIDIA doesn't provide a windows driver to setup APIC interrupts.  APIC
> functionality is exported through the ACPI methods and MP table in the
> system BIOS which the motherboard vendors supply.
> 
> Likely the root of the problem has to do with the way the Linux kernel is
> using the ACPI methods to setup the interrupts which is different from win
> 9x/2k/XP.  I can help track this down, unfortunately so far I've been unable
> to reproduce the hangs on any of the boards I have.
> 

Do you know whether the nforce2's with apic support the timer (IRQ 0) in 
IO-APIC mode?  To me, it seems like a bug:
"Dec  4 20:13:11 tesore kernel: ..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to 
IO-APIC"
(This message originates in arch/i386/kernel/io_apic.c)

nmi_watchdog doesn't seem to work at all because of this.  If it was working, 
then maybe I can catch the lockup, because if it's like you say, it's probably 
the kernel not hardware.

Jesse