NMI watchdog stability

Jonathan Lundell
2002-09-18T23:50:21Z

Back in March 2001, Keith Owens wrote and Andrew Morton replied:
At 4:47pm -0700 9/18/02, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
> >
>> Am I the only person who is annoyed that nmi watchdog is now off by
>> default and the only way to activate it is by a boot parameter? You
>> cannot even patch the kernel to build a version that has nmi watchdog
>> on because the startup code runs out of the __setup routine, no boot
>> parameter, no watchdog.
>
>It was causing SMP boxes to crash mysteriously after
>several hours or days. Quite a lot of them. Nobody
>was able to explain why, so it was turned off.

This was in the context of 2.4.2-ac21. More of the thread,with no
conclusive result, can be found at
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0103.2/0906.html

Was there any resolution? Was the problem real, did it get fixed, and
is it safe to turn on the local-APIC-based NMI ticker on a 2.4.9 SMP
system? (I'm stuck with 2.4.9, actually Red Hat's 2.4.9-31, for
external reasons.) What was the nature of the mysterious crashes?

Thanks.
--
/Jonathan Lundell.