Re: [patch] disable NMI watchdog by default

Avi Kivity
2007-03-08T19:54:42Z

Bill Davidsen wrote:
>>
>> there's a new NMI watchdog related problem: KVM crashes on certain
>> bzImages because ... we enable the NMI watchdog by default (even if
>> the user does not ask for it) , and no other OS on this planet does
>> that so KVM doesnt have emulation for that yet. So KVM injects a #GP,
>> which crashes the Linux guest:
>>
> I'm missing something, what limits this to systems running under kvm?
>

Most likely kvm doesn't implement the msrs which drive the nmi
watchdog. That makes it a kvm bug, not a problem with the nmi
watchdog. Emulating it correctly is fairly difficult, though,
especially if we want to migrate virtual machines between different
processor models, so I hope this goes in.

--
Do not meddle in the internals of kernels, for they are subtle and quick to panic.