Can't disable NMI watchdog on Debian Buster in vmware context - couldn't write to kernel, unknown error 524

Question

Following instructions, I want to disable the NMI watchdog on boot.

sudo sh -c "echo '0' > /proc/sys/kernel/nmi_watchdog"

However:

Couldn't write '0' to 'kernel/nmi_watchdog': Unknown error 524

How to proceed?

Answer 1

This is no longer required or possible on Virtual Machines as NMI watchdog requires access to real hardware.

The "Unknown error 524" is the error code for ENOTSUPP: Operation not supported.

The kernel commit that introduced this can be found here: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/