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Date:      Thu, 4 Sep 2003 16:12:44 +0300
From:      Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net>
To:        Don Bowman <don@sandvine.com>
Cc:        "'freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org'" <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: non reliable nmi
Message-ID:  <20030904131244.GU556@straylight.oblivion.bg>
In-Reply-To: <FE045D4D9F7AED4CBFF1B3B813C85337027426FC@mail.sandvine.com>
References:  <FE045D4D9F7AED4CBFF1B3B813C85337027426FC@mail.sandvine.com>

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On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 09:16:23AM -0400, Don Bowman wrote:
> > From: Mike Silbersack [mailto:silby@silby.com]
> > On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Don Bowman wrote:
> >=20
> > > I have machdep.ddb_on_nmi=3D1.
> > > I can drop into the debugger with the magic
> > > key sequence. However, when i hit the NMI
> > > jumper, i don't always go there. Sometimes
> > > I do.
> > > The system is 4-way SMP [2xHTT xeon processors]
> > > with 4.7.
> > >
> > > Any suggestion on where my NMI might be going?
> >=20
> > Is your NMI about 106K in size, and does it have the subjects=20
> > "Thank you",
> > "Wicked screensaver" and others?  If so, I think I know where it's
> > going...
>=20
> ?
> it was actually a serious question. The nmi header on
> my board goes into the ICH-3 of my chipset, but shorting the
> jumper out doesn't always enter the debugger. It does
> sometimes. If I set the NMI_NOW bit in the ICH-3 I always
> enter the debugger. I was curious if anyone else had seen
> this behaviour.

I haven't kept quite up to date on my x86 hardware lately (read: in
the past five to ten years), but I distinctly remember a time when
everyone referred to x86's NMI as a joke: a non-maskable interrupt that
anyone could mask using a simple CLI instruction.  Not sure if this is
still the case, others would have to say if today's processors still may
get so wedged that a NMI request would simply be ignored.

The other possibility is some kind of kernel mess-up, bad enough that an
NMI does indeed reach the processor, the processor does invoke the NMI
handler, yet the handler (DDB) is quite unable to actually do any useful
work - messed up data structures and such.

G'luck,
Peter

--=20
Peter Pentchev	roam@ringlet.net    roam@sbnd.net    roam@FreeBSD.org
PGP key:	http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc
Key fingerprint	FDBA FD79 C26F 3C51 C95E  DF9E ED18 B68D 1619 4553
This sentence no verb.

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