On Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:46:30 +0100, Ingo Molnar said:
> What i'd like to see for the NMI watchdog is much more ambitious than 
> this: the use of perf events to run a periodic NMI callback.
> 
> The NMI watchdog would cause the creation of a per-cpu perf_event 
> structure (in-kernel). All x86 CPUs that have perf event support (the 
> majority of them) will thus be able to have an NMI watchdog using a 
> nice, generic piece of code and we'd be able to phase out the open-coded 
> NMI watchdog code.

What happens on older/smaller x86 CPUs that don't have any native support
for perf events?