The softlockup watchdog is currently a nuisance in a virtual machine, since the whole system could have the CPU stolen from it for a long period of time. While it would be unlikely for a guest domain to be denied timer interrupts for over 10s, it could happen and any softlockup message would be completely spurious. Earlier I proposed that sched_clock() return time in unstolen nanoseconds, which is how Xen and VMI currently implement it. If the softlockup watchdog uses sched_clock() to measure time, it would automatically ignore stolen time, and therefore only report when the guest itself locked up. When running native, sched_clock() returns real-time nanoseconds, so the behaviour would be unchanged. Does this seem sound? Also, softlockup.c's use of jiffies seems archaic now. Should it be converted to use timers? Mightn't it report lockups just because there was no timer event? Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> diff -r b41fb9e70d72 kernel/softlockup.c --- a/kernel/softlockup.c Thu Mar 22 16:25:15 2007 -0700 +++ b/kernel/softlockup.c Thu Mar 22 16:26:52 2007 -0700 @@ -17,9 +17,11 @@ static DEFINE_SPINLOCK(print_lock); -static DEFINE_PER_CPU(unsigned long, touch_timestamp); -static DEFINE_PER_CPU(unsigned long, print_timestamp); +static DEFINE_PER_CPU(unsigned long long, touch_timestamp); +static DEFINE_PER_CPU(unsigned long long, print_timestamp); static DEFINE_PER_CPU(struct task_struct *, watchdog_task); + +#define SEC_NS (1000000000ull) static int did_panic = 0; @@ -37,7 +39,7 @@ static struct notifier_block panic_block void touch_softlockup_watchdog(void) { - __raw_get_cpu_var(touch_timestamp) = jiffies; + __raw_get_cpu_var(touch_timestamp) = sched_clock(); } EXPORT_SYMBOL(touch_softlockup_watchdog); @@ -49,6 +51,7 @@ void softlockup_tick(void) { int this_cpu = smp_processor_id(); unsigned long touch_timestamp = per_cpu(touch_timestamp, this_cpu); + unsigned long long now; /* prevent double reports: */ if (per_cpu(print_timestamp, this_cpu) == touch_timestamp || @@ -62,12 +65,14 @@ void softlockup_tick(void) return; } + now = sched_clock(); + /* Wake up the high-prio watchdog task every second: */ - if (time_after(jiffies, touch_timestamp + HZ)) + if (now > (touch_timestamp + SEC_NS)) wake_up_process(per_cpu(watchdog_task, this_cpu)); /* Warn about unreasonable 10+ seconds delays: */ - if (time_after(jiffies, touch_timestamp + 10*HZ)) { + if (now > (touch_timestamp + 10*SEC_NS)) { per_cpu(print_timestamp, this_cpu) = touch_timestamp; spin_lock(&print_lock); @@ -120,7 +125,7 @@ cpu_callback(struct notifier_block *nfb, printk("watchdog for %i failed\n", hotcpu); return NOTIFY_BAD; } - per_cpu(touch_timestamp, hotcpu) = jiffies; + per_cpu(touch_timestamp, hotcpu) = sched_clock(); per_cpu(watchdog_task, hotcpu) = p; kthread_bind(p, hotcpu); break; _______________________________________________ Virtualization mailing list Virtualization@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/virtualization