1 =============================================================== 2 Softlockup detector and hardlockup detector (aka nmi_watchdog) 3 =============================================================== 4 5 The Linux kernel can act as a watchdog to detect both soft and hard 6 lockups. 7 8 A 'softlockup' is defined as a bug that causes the kernel to loop in 9 kernel mode for more than 20 seconds (see "Implementation" below for 10 details), without giving other tasks a chance to run. The current 11 stack trace is displayed upon detection and, by default, the system 12 will stay locked up. Alternatively, the kernel can be configured to 13 panic; a sysctl, "kernel.softlockup_panic", a kernel parameter, 14 "softlockup_panic" (see "Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.rst" for 15 details), and a compile option, "BOOTPARAM_SOFTLOCKUP_PANIC", are 16 provided for this. 17 18 A 'hardlockup' is defined as a bug that causes the CPU to loop in 19 kernel mode for more than 10 seconds (see "Implementation" below for 20 details), without letting other interrupts have a chance to run. 21 Similarly to the softlockup case, the current stack trace is displayed 22 upon detection and the system will stay locked up unless the default 23 behavior is changed, which can be done through a sysctl, 24 'hardlockup_panic', a compile time knob, "BOOTPARAM_HARDLOCKUP_PANIC", 25 and a kernel parameter, "nmi_watchdog" 26 (see "Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.rst" for details). 27 28 The panic option can be used in combination with panic_timeout (this 29 timeout is set through the confusingly named "kernel.panic" sysctl), 30 to cause the system to reboot automatically after a specified amount 31 of time. 32 33 Implementation 34 ============== 35 36 The soft and hard lockup detectors are built on top of the hrtimer and 37 perf subsystems, respectively. A direct consequence of this is that, 38 in principle, they should work in any architecture where these 39 subsystems are present. 40 41 A periodic hrtimer runs to generate interrupts and kick the watchdog 42 job. An NMI perf event is generated every "watchdog_thresh" 43 (compile-time initialized to 10 and configurable through sysctl of the 44 same name) seconds to check for hardlockups. If any CPU in the system 45 does not receive any hrtimer interrupt during that time the 46 'hardlockup detector' (the handler for the NMI perf event) will 47 generate a kernel warning or call panic, depending on the 48 configuration. 49 50 The watchdog job runs in a stop scheduling thread that updates a 51 timestamp every time it is scheduled. If that timestamp is not updated 52 for 2*watchdog_thresh seconds (the softlockup threshold) the 53 'softlockup detector' (coded inside the hrtimer callback function) 54 will dump useful debug information to the system log, after which it 55 will call panic if it was instructed to do so or resume execution of 56 other kernel code. 57 58 The period of the hrtimer is 2*watchdog_thresh/5, which means it has 59 two or three chances to generate an interrupt before the hardlockup 60 detector kicks in. 61 62 As explained above, a kernel knob is provided that allows 63 administrators to configure the period of the hrtimer and the perf 64 event. The right value for a particular environment is a trade-off 65 between fast response to lockups and detection overhead. 66 67 By default, the watchdog runs on all online cores. However, on a 68 kernel configured with NO_HZ_FULL, by default the watchdog runs only 69 on the housekeeping cores, not the cores specified in the "nohz_full" 70 boot argument. If we allowed the watchdog to run by default on 71 the "nohz_full" cores, we would have to run timer ticks to activate 72 the scheduler, which would prevent the "nohz_full" functionality 73 from protecting the user code on those cores from the kernel. 74 Of course, disabling it by default on the nohz_full cores means that 75 when those cores do enter the kernel, by default we will not be 76 able to detect if they lock up. However, allowing the watchdog 77 to continue to run on the housekeeping (non-tickless) cores means 78 that we will continue to detect lockups properly on those cores. 79 80 In either case, the set of cores excluded from running the watchdog 81 may be adjusted via the kernel.watchdog_cpumask sysctl. For 82 nohz_full cores, this may be useful for debugging a case where the 83 kernel seems to be hanging on the nohz_full cores.
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