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Commit 33c6d6a7 authored by Don Zickus's avatar Don Zickus Committed by Ingo Molnar
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x86, perf, nmi: Disable perf if counters are not accessible



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>
parent dddd3379
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