Bug#599368: [124/152] watchdog: Improve initialisation error message and documentation

[Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>]

2.6.36-stable review patch.  If anyone has any objections, please let us know.

------------------

From: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>

commit 551423748a4eba55f2eb0fc250d757986471f187 upstream.

The error message 'NMI watchdog failed to create perf event...'
does not make it clear that this is a fatal error for the
watchdog.  It also currently prints the error value as a
pointer, rather than extracting the error code with PTR_ERR().
Fix that.

Add a note to the description of the 'nowatchdog' kernel
parameter to associate it with this message.

Reported-by: Cesare Leonardi <celeonar@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
Cc: 599368@bugs.debian.org
Cc: 608138@bugs.debian.org
Cc: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
LKML-Reference: <[🔎] 1294009362.3167.126.camel@localhost>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

---
 Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt |    2 +-
 kernel/watchdog.c                   |    3 ++-
 2 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

--- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -1745,7 +1745,7 @@ and is between 256 and 4096 characters.
 
 	nousb		[USB] Disable the USB subsystem
 
-	nowatchdog	[KNL] Disable the lockup detector.
+	nowatchdog	[KNL] Disable the lockup detector (NMI watchdog).
 
 	nowb		[ARM]
 
--- a/kernel/watchdog.c
+++ b/kernel/watchdog.c
@@ -377,7 +377,8 @@ static int watchdog_nmi_enable(int cpu)
 		goto out_save;
 	}
 
-	printk(KERN_ERR "NMI watchdog failed to create perf event on cpu%i: %p\n", cpu, event);
+	printk(KERN_ERR "NMI watchdog disabled for cpu%i: unable to create perf event: %ld\n",
+	       cpu, PTR_ERR(event));
 	return -1;
 
 	/* success path */