[PATCH] hardlockup: detect hard lockups without NMIs using secondary cpus

[Frederic Weisbecker]

2013/1/10 Russell King - ARM Linux <linux at arm.linux.org.uk>:
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 09:02:15AM -0500, Don Zickus wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 05:57:39PM -0800, Colin Cross wrote:
>> > Emulate NMIs on systems where they are not available by using timer
>> > interrupts on other cpus.  Each cpu will use its softlockup hrtimer
>> > to check that the next cpu is processing hrtimer interrupts by
>> > verifying that a counter is increasing.
>> >
>> > This patch is useful on systems where the hardlockup detector is not
>> > available due to a lack of NMIs, for example most ARM SoCs.
>>
>> I have seen other cpus, like Sparc I think, create a 'virtual NMI' by
>> reserving an IRQ line as 'special' (can not be masked).  Not sure if that
>> is something worth looking at here (or even possible).
>
> No it isn't, because that assumes that things like spin_lock_irqsave()
> won't mask that interrupt.  We don't have the facility to do that.

I believe sparc is doing something like this though. Look at
arch/sparc/include/asm/irqflags_64.h, it seems NMIs are implemented
there using an irq number that is not masked by this function.

Not all archs can do that so easily I guess.