[Haifux] Kernel oops, so what?

[Eli Billauer]

Hi,

Just to wrap the story up: I checked the source code. The offending 
"oops" comes from a line 390 in hpet.c, which is the WARN_ON_ONCE call 
below:

<kernel code>
    /*
     * We need to read back the CMP register to make sure that
     * what we wrote hit the chip before we compare it to the
     * counter.
     */
    WARN_ON_ONCE((u32)hpet_readl(HPET_Tn_CMP(timer)) != cnt);
</kernel code>

(there are two hpet.c in the kernel tree, but I won't be fussy)

In a more recent kernel the most dramatic change is this module was that 
the comment was changed to:

    /*
     * We need to read back the CMP register on certain HPET
     * implementations (ATI chipsets) which seem to delay the
     * transfer of the compare register into the internal compare
     * logic. With small deltas this might actually be too late as
     * the counter could already be higher than the compare value
     * at that point and we would wait for the next hpet interrupt
     * forever. We found out that reading the CMP register back
     * forces the transfer so we can rely on the comparison with
     * the counter register below. If the read back from the
     * compare register does not match the value we programmed
     * then we might have a real hardware problem. We can not do
     * much about it here, but at least alert the user/admin with
     * a prominent warning.

This looks like the driver failed on some sanity check. Not happy with 
it, but I saw no smoke.

Since the CONFIG_BUG flag is set on my kernel configuration (don't think 
I was aware of that issue until now) that kicked off an oops.

This code is obviously responsible for the High Precision Event Timer on 
my machine. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Precision_Event_Timer

So the bottom line is that my super precise timer will not work in the 
near future, but the most likely reason for a filesystem crash is 
between chair and keyboard. That's a comforting thought. ;)

   Eli


-- 
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