Using O-Profile with Linux RedHat OS => conflict with NMI watchdog

Question

I was trying to run o-profile (a profiling program for linux) and kept getting an error while starting saying something like counter 0 was being use by 'NMI watchdog'. Is NMI part of the OS or is it a separate package that was downloaded? How would I go about uninstalling it?

I tried this on another Linux machine with the same OS and specs and O-Profile ran with no errors.

Answer 1

NMI (Non maskable interrupt) watchdog is a hardware watchdog timer that detects if software has crashed in order to force an automatic hardware reset of the system.

Answer 2

running echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog after opcontrol --deinit and before opcontrol --start should work. Essentially what you are doing by running that command is disabling the nmi_watchdog.

Answer 3

I ran into a similar problem on a RHEL6 bsaed distribution. When doing

sudo opcontrol --start

I got:

Error: counter 0 not available nmi_watchdog using this resource ? Try:
opcontrol --deinit
echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog

Executing the last two lines of this message (de-initializing oprofile and stopping the NMI watchdog) solved the problem.