Re: NMI: Enable watchdog by default

[Keir Fraser <keir.xen@gmail.com>]

On 07/03/2012 17:35, "George Dunlap" <George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 5:11 PM, Keir Fraser <keir@xen.org> wrote:
>> On 07/03/2012 16:55, "Andrew Cooper" <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> This patch is based on one which has been in XenServer for a very long.
>>> 
>>> To keep the trend of documentation going, it also corrects the new
>>> command line document.
>> 
>> This does not only enable the watchdog by default, but also changes the
>> timeout from 5 seconds to 5 *minutes*!
>> 
>> Even if that is a good idea in some cases, we'd at least have to make the
>> timeout configurable. Developers will not appreciate having to wait for 5
>> minutes for their lockups to produce useful trace output.
> 
> Yes, the 5 minute timeout is what we ship for production boxes, so
> that we can catch actual deadlocks while being *really really* sure we
> don't take down a customer's system unless it's *really* dead.  I
> think leaving the timeout as it is and making it configurable is
> probably the best option.

A patch to do that would be acceptable. With that we may as well keep NMI
watchdog disabled by default, and default timeout of 5 seconds. That then
means that XenServer carries a command-line option for its watchdog
settings, rather than a patch.

 -- Keir

>  -George
> 
>> 
>>  -- Keir
>> 
>> 
>> 
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