Hey all- A hang on kdump was reported to me awhile back, only when systems died via nmi watchdog panic. The hang wouldn't always be in the same place, but it would usually be somewhere down in purgatory. In looking at the code, it occured to me that since, during an nmi interrupt, we won't be able to handle additional interrupts, that we won't be able to halt the other processors on a system like we try to do in machine_crash_shutdown. As such, it appears that leaving the other cpus running exposes us to the risk that another processor will encounter an error and halt the system while we are trying to boot the kdump kernel, and that can result in a hang. I wrote the attached patch to end the nmi interrupt prior to calling crash_kexec from within die_nmi, and testing here has proven successfull. Regards Neil Signed-off-by: Neil Horman <nhorman at tuxdriver.com> traps_32.c | 2 ++ traps_64.c | 5 ++++- 2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/traps_32.c b/arch/x86/kernel/traps_32.c index 3cf7297..4443e8e 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kernel/traps_32.c +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/traps_32.c @@ -751,6 +751,8 @@ void __kprobes die_nmi(struct pt_regs *regs, const char *msg) * and might aswell get out now while we still can. */ if (!user_mode_vm(regs)) { + nmi_exit(); + local_irq_enable(); current->thread.trap_no = 2; crash_kexec(regs); } diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/traps_64.c b/arch/x86/kernel/traps_64.c index efc66df..0a50e70 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kernel/traps_64.c +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/traps_64.c @@ -608,8 +608,11 @@ void __kprobes die_nmi(char *str, struct pt_regs *regs, int do_panic) */ printk(str, smp_processor_id()); show_registers(regs); - if (kexec_should_crash(current)) + if (kexec_should_crash(current)) { + nmi_exit(); + local_irq_enable(); crash_kexec(regs); + } if (do_panic || panic_on_oops) panic("Non maskable interrupt"); oops_end(flags, NULL, SIGBUS); -- /*************************************************** *Neil Horman *nhorman at tuxdriver.com *gpg keyid: 1024D / 0x92A74FA1 *http://pgp.mit.edu ***************************************************/