6.1 kernel messages

[Toomas Aas]

up at 3.am wrote:

> Having just migrated a server from 4.10-STABLE to 6.1-STABLE, I'm curious
> about some kernel messages in dmesg that I hadn't seen before:
> 
> asr0: [GIANT-LOCKED]  (adaptec RAID adapter)
> uhci0: [GIANT-LOCKED]  (USB driver)
> atkbd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]  (keyboard driver)
> 
> I'm running SMP with 2 CPUs...a quick google shows that some people think
> it may be cause for concern but others do not.  Is it?

I don't think it's a problem - at least not a major problem that you 
need to lose sleep over, unless you're a kernel hacker. It just means 
that those particular drivers have not yet been updated to support 
fine-grained kernel locking and so the Giant lock is acquired on the 
entire kernel when these drivers run - meaning that other processes 
can't be serviced by the kernel at the same time. In FreeBSD 4.x this 
kind of message didn't exist because having only one process accessing 
the kernel at any one time was the *only* possibility back then.

> Then there's this:
> 
> acpi0: <PTLTD   RSDT> on motherboard
> acpi0: Power Button (fixed)
> acpi: bad write to port 0x070 (8), val 0x43
> acpi: bad read from port 0x071 (8)

AFAIK this is FreeBSD telling you that your machine's BIOS is trying to 
access memory areas where it has no business going. I started seeing 
those messages on my 6.1-STABLE home box sometime in June this year and 
have been ignoring them. So far, nothing bad seems to have happened.

Sorry for somewhat vague answers, but seeing as nobody has offered 
anything more scientific...


--
Toomas Aas