• Ingo Molnar's avatar
    [PATCH] disable NMI watchdog by default · 6ebf622b
    Ingo Molnar authored
    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:
    
     general protection fault: 0000 [#1]
     PREEMPT SMP
     Modules linked in:
     CPU:    0
     EIP:    0060:[<c011a8ae>]    Not tainted VLI
     EFLAGS: 00000246   (2.6.20-rc5-rt0 #3)
     EIP is at setup_apic_nmi_watchdog+0x26d/0x3d3
    
    and no, i did /not/ request an nmi_watchdog on the boot command line!
    
    Solution: turn off that darn thing! It's a debug tool, not a 'make life
    harder' tool!!
    
    with this patch the KVM guest boots up just fine.
    
    And with this my laptop (Lenovo T60) also stopped its sporadic hard
    hanging (sometimes in acpi_init(), sometimes later during bootup,
    sometimes much later during actual use) as well. It hung with both
    nmi_watchdog=1 and nmi_watchdog=2, so it's generally the fact of NMI
    injection that is causing problems, not the NMI watchdog variant, nor
    any particular bootup code.
    
    [ NMI breaks on some systems, esp in combination with SMM -Arjan ]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    Acked-by: default avatarArjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    6ebf622b
nmi.h 2.08 KB