Re: [RFC] Fix NMI watchdog documentation

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On Sun, 2003-05-25 at 01:03, Zwane Mwaikambo wrote: 
> On Sun, 25 May 2003 Valdis.Kletnieks@xxxxxx wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 24 May 2003 23:36:26 EDT, Zwane Mwaikambo said:
> > 
> > > > Dell Latitude with broken BIOS detected. Refusing to enable the local APIC.
> > 
> > > It's known broken with that configuration and hence blacklisted.
> > 
> > Yes, I know it's blacklisted.  The question I intended to ask was "Is the
> > entire concept of IOAPIC irretrievably scrozzled on this machine, or is there
> > sufficient minimum functionality to get nmi_watchdog working?"
> 
> You don't have an IOAPIC at all, but the Local APIC has been known to 
> cause problems. So forget about nmi_watchdog.
> 
> 	Zwane

I was reading that code the other day (just out of curiosity, believe it
or not) and I'm wondering how recently that has been tested - most of
the blacklist/oddness workarounds listed in dmi_scan.c are
model-specific, but the APIC entry is any Dell Inspiron or Latitude.  

I'm going to remove the test tomorrow sometime and see what happens -
lots has changed since the Inspiron 8000, including a migration to
p4-mobile, so its worth seeing if the newer Dells are fixed.  If so,
I'll submit a patch to make that more model-specific (probably I'll just
add a whitelist function - no_local_apic_kills_bios or some such; seems
better than listing every dell inspiron individually..)

I'm encouraged by the complete lack of APM or any of the 'enter bios
while running' options present on the older laptops; according to the
comments, even if the APIC kills the bios on entry/exit, it won't matter
since you can't trigger it to begin with..

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