kdb
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: KDB improvements for IA64

To: davidm@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: KDB improvements for IA64
From: Francois Wellenreiter <Francois.Wellenreiter@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 08:06:54 +0200
Cc: linux-ia64@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, kdb@xxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <17024.64713.827619.735000@napali.hpl.hp.com>
References: <4280D2C5.3060604@bull.net> <17024.64713.827619.735000@napali.hpl.hp.com>
Sender: kdb-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxx
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913
>>>>>>On Tue, 10 May 2005 17:27:01 +0200, Francois Wellenreiter 
>>>>>><Francois.Wellenreiter@xxxxxxxx> said:
> 
> 
>   Francois> - timeouts when exiting from KDB will never occur I have
>   Francois> noticed that after a long time in KDB, some drivers enter
>   Francois> in timeout sequences. Now, the different ITC values are
>   Francois> saved when entering KDB and restored when going out.
> 
> This sounds fragile to me.  For one thing, the kernel may not use ITC
> at all for timeouts (true for most NUMA platforms).  Also, even if the
> ITC is in use, you'd probably have to resync them on the slave CPUs
> after restoring the time-keeper's ITC value.  Not to mention that if
> the timeout is related to an external event, then faking time won't
> help no matter what.
> 
>       --david
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> 


                David,

        I agree that ITC management may be a bit risky and overall is 
platform-dependent, but in my opinion, that was a better way than saving and
restoring global xtime variable which can be modified by only one CPU
(the main danger in such a case may occur when this CPU is working
when the other ones are already running KDB).

The time-outs that I have noticed dealt with journalled filesystem messages
(and sometimes lead to an unrecoverable machine crash),
that is the reason why I have implemented this feature. On the different
NUMA machines that I have tested, this problem did not appear again.

If you have some implementation ideas, they are really welcome.

Regards,

                Francois
---------------------------
Use http://oss.sgi.com/ecartis to modify your settings or to unsubscribe.
<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>