Re: [PATCH 3/8] watchdog: Boot-disable by default on full dynticks

[Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>]

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 01:52:29PM -0400, Don Zickus wrote:
> On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 06:01:51PM +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > When the watchdog runs, it prevents the full dynticks
> > CPUs from stopping their tick because the hard lockup
> > detector uses perf events internally, which in turn
> > rely on the periodic tick.
> > 
> > Since this is a rather confusing behaviour that is not
> > easy to track down and identify for those who want to
> > test CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL, let's default disable the
> > watchdog on boot time when full dynticks is enabled.
> > 
> > The user can still enable it later on runtime using
> > proc or sysctl.
> 
> I thought Peter committed a patch to perf so that this isn't needed any
> more?

There is the patchset that converts perf_event_task_tick() to an hrtimer.
But I'm not sure it covers everything. Also this will be for the next merge
window. And in the end this moves the problem elsewhere: we still have timer
interrupts, they just come as specific hrtimers, although may be less often,
I haven't looked yet at the patchset.