Re: bisected: 'perf top' causing soft lockups under Xen

Peter Zijlstra
2012-02-10T17:24:51Z

On Fri, 2012-02-10 at 11:12 -0500, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> Hm, during bootup what does perf say about the CPU availability? Is
> it that it can only do perf via NMI's?

We used to pass down if the event came from NMI context or not in order
to avoid doing certain things that were not NMI-safe, like wakeups.

That patch changed the code so that it always assumed the worst case
(NMI) and thus avoids doing such things.

All non-NMI-safe operations are pushed out to IRQ context through
kernel/irq_work.c. If there's no particular platform support for that,
it falls back to doing that work from the timer tick.

Now that all _should_ just work but clearly there's a problem there.

I haven't tried making sense of the traces yet..