For some time each panic() called with interrupts disabled
triggered the !irqs_disabled() WARN_ON in smp_call_function(),
producing ugly backtraces and confusing users.
This is a common situation with machine checks for example which
tend to call panic with interrupts disabled, but will also hit
in other situations e.g. panic during early boot. In fact it
means that panic cannot be called in many circumstances, which
would be bad.
This all started with the new fancy queued smp_call_function,
which is then used by the shutdown path to shut down the other
CPUs.
On closer examination it turned out that the fancy RCU
smp_call_function() does lots of things not suitable in a panic
situation anyways, like allocating memory and relying on complex
system state.
I originally tried to patch this over by checking for panic
there, but it was quite complicated and the original patch
was also not very popular. This also didn't fix some of the
underlying complexity problems.
The new code in post 2.6.29 tries to patch around this by
checking for oops_in_progress, but that is not enough to make
this fully safe and I don't think that's a real solution
because panic has to be reliable.
So instead use an own vector to reboot. This makes the reboot
code extremly straight forward, which is definitely a big plus
in a panic situation where it is important to avoid relying on
too much kernel state. The new simple code is also safe to be
called from interupts off region because it is very very simple.
There can be situations where it is important that panic
is reliable. For example on a fatal machine check the panic
is needed to get the system up again and running as quickly
as possible. So it's important that panic is reliable and
all function it calls simple.
This is why I came up with this simple vector scheme.
It's very hard to beat in simplicity. Vectors are not
particularly precious anymore since all big systems are
using per CPU vectors.
Another possibility would have been to use an NMI similar
to kdump, but there is still the problem that NMIs don't
work reliably on some systems due to BIOS issues. NMIs
would have been able to stop CPUs running with interrupts
off too. In the sake of universal reliability I opted for
using a non NMI vector for now.
I put the reboot vector into the highest priority bucket of
the APIC vectors and moved the 64bit UV_BAU message down
instead into the next lower priority.
[ Impact: bug fix, fixes an old regression ]
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Hidetoshi Seto <seto.hidetoshi@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
4ef702c10b