Skip to content
  • Don Zickus's avatar
    x86, perf, nmi: Disable perf if counters are not accessible · 33c6d6a7
    Don Zickus authored
    
    
    In a kvm virt guests, the perf counters are not emulated.  Instead they
    return zero on a rdmsrl. The perf nmi handler uses the fact that crossing
    a zero means the counter overflowed (for those counters that do not have
    specific interrupt bits). Therefore on kvm guests, perf will swallow all
    NMIs thinking the counters overflowed.
    
    This causes problems for subsystems like kgdb which needs NMIs to do its
    magic. This problem was discovered by running kgdb tests.
    
    The solution is to write garbage into a perf counter during the
    initialization and hopefully reading back the same number.  On kvm
    guests, the value will be read back as zero and we disable perf as
    a result.
    
    Reported-by: default avatarJason Wessel <jason.wessel@windriver.com>
    Patch-inspired-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDon Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
    Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
    LKML-Reference: <1290462923-30734-1-git-send-email-dzickus@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    33c6d6a7