Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261894AbVEQRUd (ORCPT ); Tue, 17 May 2005 13:20:33 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261864AbVEQRU2 (ORCPT ); Tue, 17 May 2005 13:20:28 -0400 Received: from fire.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:54724 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261894AbVEQRT2 (ORCPT ); Tue, 17 May 2005 13:19:28 -0400 Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 10:20:45 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: "Maciej W. Rozycki" cc: Kirill Korotaev , "Martin J. Bligh" , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] NMI watchdog config option (was: Re: [PATCH] NMI lockup and AltSysRq-P dumping calltraces on _all_ cpus via NMI IPI) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <42822B5F.8040901@sw.ru> <768860000.1116282855@flay> <42899797.2090702@sw.ru> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1209 Lines: 32 On Tue, 17 May 2005, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > > > "exciting", and we've several times had code that does actually disable > > interrupts for a long time - which may be exceedingly impolite, but then > > the NMI watchdog makes it a fatal error rather than something that is just > > a nuisanse. > > Well, this is actually not a problem with the watchdog itself. And I'd > rather say it's doing us a favour (and a great job) finding these buggy > bits of code that keep interrupts off CPUs. ;-) For a _developer_ yes. For a user under X, who finds his machine locked up and not doing anything, no. And this is _exactly_ why we don't enable it by default. Go wild on your own machines - I used to do it myself. But users are better off with working machines. IOW, testing is good, but it's _not_ good if you test your users to destruction. User testing should be limited (as far as humanly possible) to things that they can sanely report. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/