[NMI watchdog is available for x86 and x86-64 architectures]
3
4 Is your system locking up unpredictably? No keyboard activity, just
5 a frustrating complete hard lockup? Do you want to help us debugging
6 such lockups? If all yes then this document is definitely for you.
7
8 On many x86/x86-64 type hardware there is a feature that enables
9 us to generate 'watchdog NMI interrupts'. (NMI: Non Maskable Interrupt
10 which get executed even if the system is otherwise locked up hard).
11 This can be used to debug hard kernel lockups. By executing periodic
12 NMI interrupts, the kernel can monitor whether any CPU has locked up,
13 and print out debugging messages if so.
14
15 In order to use the NMI watchdog, you need to have APIC support in your
16 kernel. For SMP kernels, APIC support gets compiled in automatically. For