The NMI handlers used to rely on the notifier infrastructure. This worked
great until we wanted to support handling multiple events better.
One of the key ideas to the nmi handling is to process _all_ the handlers for
each NMI. The reason behind this switch is because NMIs are edge triggered.
If enough NMIs are triggered, then they could be lost because the cpu can
only latch at most one NMI (besides the one currently being processed).
In order to deal with this we have decided to process all the NMI handlers
for each NMI. This allows the handlers to determine if they recieved an
event or not (the ones that can not determine this will be left to fend
for themselves on the unknown NMI list).
As a result of this change it is now possible to have an extra NMI that
was destined to be received for an already processed event. Because the
event was processed in the previous NMI, this NMI gets dropped and becomes
an 'unknown' NMI. This of course will cause printks that scare people.
However, we prefer to have extra NMIs as opposed to losing NMIs and as such
are have developed a basic mechanism to catch most of them. That will be
a later patch.
To accomplish this idea, I unhooked the nmi handlers from the notifier
routines and created a new mechanism loosely based on doIRQ. The reason
for this is the notifier routines have a couple of shortcomings. One we
could't guarantee all future NMI handlers used NOTIFY_OK instead of
NOTIFY_STOP. Second, we couldn't keep track of the number of events being
handled in each routine (most only handle one, perf can handle more than one).
Third, I wanted to eventually display which nmi handlers are registered in
the system in /proc/interrupts to help see who is generating NMIs.
The patch below just implements the new infrastructure but doesn't wire it up
yet (that is the next patch). Its design is based on doIRQ structs and the
atomic notifier routines. So the rcu stuff in the patch isn't entirely untested
(as the notifier routines have soaked it) but it should be double checked in
case I copied the code wrong.
Signed-off-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1317409584-23662-3-git-send-email-dzickus@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
c9126b2ee8