Re: Catching NForce2 lockup with NMI watchdog

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Bill Davidsen wrote:

> >  Well, the NMI watchdog is a side-effect feature that works by chance
> > rather than by design.  So you can't really complain it doesn't work
> > somewhere, although I wouldn't mind if new hardware was designed such that
> > it works.  You shouldn't have to use "acpi=force" for the watchdog to work
> > though and for a PII system if "nmi_watchdog=1" doesn't work, then I
> > suspect a BIOS bug (set APIC_DEBUG to 1 in asm-i386/apic.h and send me the
> > bootstrap log and a dump from `mptable' for a diagnosis, if interested).
> 
> Has the check to see if the BIOS is old than very recent been removed? I
> used to get a message that the BIOS was too old, I believe that's what
> prompted the acpi to enable the local apic. Sorrt, I've been running that
> feature since 2.5.3x or so and I just carried it forward.

 I don't know what check you refer to, sorry.  I don't think we do any
version checks in the APIC code.  Perhaps ACPI does some, but having no
use for it anywhere I'm not familiar with that area.

 If the "nmi_watchdog=1" option doesn't work for a PII system, then its
most likely a bug in BIOS IRQ routing tables -- either missing or broken
entries for the 8254 timer and/or the 8259A ExtINTA source.

-- 
+  Maciej W. Rozycki, Technical University of Gdansk, Poland   +
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
+        e-mail: macro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, PGP key available        +
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