Potential Panics

Here is a set of mutex-related panics:

panic: recursive mutex_enter. mutex %x caller %x

Mutexes are not re-entrant by the same thread. If you already own the mutex, you cannot own it again. Doing this leads to this panic.

panic: mutex_adaptive_exit: mutex not held by thread

Releasing a mutex that the current thread does not hold causes this panic.

panic: lock_set: lock held and only one CPU

This panic only occurs on a uniprocessor. It indicates that a spin mutex is held and it would spin forever, because there is no other CPU to release it. This could happen because the driver forgot to release the mutex on one code path, or blocked while holding it.

A common cause of this panic is that the device's interrupt is high-level (see ddi_intr_hilevel(9F) and Intro(9F)), and is calling a routine that blocks the interrupt handler while holding a spin mutex. This is obvious if the driver explicitly calls cv_wait(9F), but might not be so if it's blocking while grabbing an adaptive mutex with mutex_enter(9F).

In principle, this is only a problem for drivers that operate above lock level.