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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.

user972276
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3 Answers3

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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.

TJD
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  • ok so I assume NMI is using some of the counters needed by O-Profile since O-Profile uses processor counters to gather statistics. Would that be correct? Is NMI part of RedHat or is it a separate package and can be uninstalled? – user972276 Nov 29 '11 at 23:39
  • This link explains it and says how to disable it. http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/lnxinfo/v3r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fliaai%2Fcrashdump%2Fliaaicrashdumpnmiwatch.htm – TJD Nov 29 '11 at 23:49
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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.

Andre Holzner
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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.

aakash
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