Don Zickus reports:
A customer generated an external NMI using their iLO to test kdump
worked. Unfortunately, the machine hung. Disabling the nmi_watchdog
made things work.
I speculated the external NMI fired, caused the machine to panic (as
expected) and the perf NMI from the watchdog came in and was latched.
My guess was this somehow caused the hang.
----
It appears that the latched NMI stays latched until the early page
table generation on 64 bits, which causes exceptions to happen which
end in IRET, which re-enable NMI. Therefore, ignore NMIs that come in
during early execution, until we have proper exception handling.
Reported-and-tested-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1394221143-29713-1-git-send-email-dzickus@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org> # v3.5+, older with some backport effort
5fa10196bd