The softlockup detector does some gymnastic with the variable
soft_watchdog_warn.  It was added by the commit 58687acb
("lockup_detector: Combine nmi_watchdog and softlockup detector").

The purpose is not completely clear.  There are the following clues.  They
describe the situation how it looked after the above mentioned commit:

  1. The variable was checked with a comment "only warn once".

  2. The variable was set when softlockup was reported. It was cleared
     only when the CPU was not longer in the softlockup state.

  3. watchdog_touch_ts was not explicitly updated when the softlockup
     was reported. Without this variable, the report would normally
     be printed again during every following watchdog_timer_fn()
     invocation.

The logic has got even more tangled up by the commit ed235875
("kernel/watchdog.c: print traces for all cpus on lockup detection").
After this commit, soft_watchdog_warn is set only when
softlockup_all_cpu_backtrace is enabled.  But multiple reports from all
CPUs are prevented by a new variable soft_lockup_nmi_warn.

Conclusion:

The variable probably never worked as intended.  In each case, it has not
worked last many years because the softlockup was reported repeatedly
after the full period defined by watchdog_thresh.

The reason is that watchdog gets touched in many known slow paths, for
example, in printk_stack_address().  This code is called also when
printing the softlockup report.  It means that the watchdog timestamp gets
updated after each report.

Solution:

Simply remove the logic. People want the periodic report anyway.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210311122130.6788-5-pmladek@suse.comSigned-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Laurence Oberman <loberman@redhat.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Vincent Whitchurch <vincent.whitchurch@axis.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>