Re: A question of perf NMI handler

Robert Richter
2010-08-04T18:51:30Z

(cc'ing Andi)

On 04.08.10 12:39:30, Cyrill Gorcunov wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 12:20:26PM -0400, Don Zickus wrote:

> > there. The problem is the bits in register 0x61 are not always set
> > correctly in the case of SERRs (well at least in all the cases I have
> > dealt with). So you can easily can a flood of unknown nmis from an SERR
> > and register 0x61 would have the PERR/SERR bits set to 0. Fun, huh?
>
> if there is nothing in nmi_sc the code flows into another branch. And
> it hits the problem of perf events eating all nmi giving no chance the
> others. So we take if (!(reason & 0xc0)) case and hit DIE_NMI_IPI
> (/me scratching the head why it's not under CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC) and
> drop all code, unpleasant.

Only the upper 2 bits in io_61h indicate the nmi reason, so in case of
(!(reason & 0xc0)) the source simply can not be determined and all nmi
handlers in the chain must be called (DIE_NMI/DIE_NMI_IPI). The
perfctr handler then stops it.

So you can decide to either get an unrecovered nmi panic triggered by
a perfctr or losing unknown nmis from other sources. Maybe this can be
fixed by implementing handlers for those sources.

-Robert

--
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Operating System Research Center