The following back trace represents a deadlock in Ubicom's SMP port of 2.6.28 kernel. I am sure that we are doing something unexpected. I would appreciate the community's help in understanding what is going wrong. Thanks in advance for any pointers, Sol Kavy Problem: Ubicom's initial port does not use GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS. Instead it uses a periodic timer based on HZ. The periodic timer calls do_timer() on each tick. >From the arch directory perspective, we are required to hold the xtime_lock before calling do_timer(). The lock is indeed help by cpu 3 as evidenced in the output below. The call to get_jiffies_64() at the top of the backtrace is attempting to read the jiffies in a reliable fashion. The caller is required to wait for the xtime_lock not to be held. Clearly, since we are in a path that is holding the xtime_lock, this will never make forward progress. What is unclear to me is why other ports are not seeing the same problem? Perhaps it is because most ports now set GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS which uses an entirely different mechanism for doing things. I am in the middle of switching the port to use GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS but would like to understand this failure in more detail. Any feedback is greatly appreciated, Sol Config Flags: # CONFIG_GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS is not set CONFIG_GENERIC_HARDIRQS=y CONFIG_IRQ_PER_CPU=y CONFIG_TRACE_IRQFLAGS_SUPPORT=y # CONFIG_DEBUG_SHIRQ is not set CONFIG_TRACE_IRQFLAGS=y CONFIG_IRQSOFF_TRACER=y State of the lock: (gdb) p xtime_lock $5 = {sequence = 47089, lock = {raw_lock = {lock = 1}, magic = 3735899821, owner_cpu = 3, owner = 0x42b01160}} This is a backtrace from CPU 3: (gdb) bt #0 get_jiffies_64 () at include/linux/seqlock.h:94 #1 0x4044f558 in sched_clock () at kernel/sched_clock.c:40 #2 0x4045f108 in ring_buffer_time_stamp (cpu=3) at kernel/trace/ring_buffer.c:58 #3 0x40464c50 in ftrace_now (cpu=3) at kernel/trace/trace.c:77 #4 0x404656ec in trace_hardirqs_off () at kernel/trace/trace_irqsoff.c:207 #5 0x40413020 in _spin_lock_irqsave (lock=0x3) at kernel/spinlock.c:82 #6 0x40451b2c in clocksource_get_next () at kernel/time/clocksource.c:254 #7 0x3ffd08ac in update_wall_time () at kernel/time/timekeeping.c:182 #8 0x4043bcd8 in do_timer (ticks=0) at kernel/timer.c:1125 #9 0x404169f8 in timer_tick (irq=<value optimized out>, dummy=<value optimized out>) at arch/ubicom32/kernel/time.c:126 #10 0x3ffcefb0 in handle_IRQ_event (irq=<value optimized out>, action=0x406fe6f4) at kernel/irq/handle.c:142 #11 0x3ffcee20 in __do_IRQ (irq=<value optimized out>) at kernel/irq/handle.c:239 #12 0x3ffcfcc8 in do_IRQ (irq=47089, regs=<value optimized out>) at arch/ubicom32/kernel/irq.c:250 #13 0x4041018c in sys_call_table () #14 0x4044f558 in sched_clock () at kernel/sched_clock.c:40 #15 0x00000008 in ?? () -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs