[PATCH] powerpc/pseries: Enable hardlockup watchdog for PowerVM partitions

Nicholas Piggin npiggin at gmail.com
Mon May 3 21:18:22 AEST 2021


PowerVM will not arbitrarily oversubscribe or stop guests, page out the
guest kernel text to a NFS volume connected by carrier pigeon to abacus
based storage, etc., as a KVM host might. So PowerVM guests are not
likely to be killed by the hard lockup watchdog in normal operation,
even with shared processor LPARs which still get a minimum allotment of
CPU time.

Enable the hard lockup detector by default on !KVM guests, which we will
assume is PowerVM. It has been useful in finding problems on bare metal
kernels.

Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin at gmail.com>
---
 arch/powerpc/kernel/setup_64.c | 8 +++++---
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/powerpc/kernel/setup_64.c b/arch/powerpc/kernel/setup_64.c
index b779d25761cf..c0e234456863 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/kernel/setup_64.c
+++ b/arch/powerpc/kernel/setup_64.c
@@ -939,15 +939,17 @@ u64 hw_nmi_get_sample_period(int watchdog_thresh)
  * disable it by default. Book3S has a soft-nmi hardlockup detector based
  * on the decrementer interrupt, so it does not suffer from this problem.
  *
- * It is likely to get false positives in VM guests, so disable it there
- * by default too.
+ * It is likely to get false positives in KVM guests, so disable it there
+ * by default too. PowerVM will not stop or arbitrarily oversubscribe
+ * CPUs, but give a minimum regular allotment even with SPLPAR, so enable
+ * the detector for non-KVM guests, assume PowerVM.
  */
 static int __init disable_hardlockup_detector(void)
 {
 #ifdef CONFIG_HARDLOCKUP_DETECTOR_PERF
 	hardlockup_detector_disable();
 #else
-	if (firmware_has_feature(FW_FEATURE_LPAR))
+	if (is_kvm_guest())
 		hardlockup_detector_disable();
 #endif
 
-- 
2.23.0



More information about the Linuxppc-dev mailing list