Guenter reported:
  There is still a problem. When running 
    echo 6 > /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog_thresh
    echo 5 > /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog_thresh
  repeatedly, the message
 
   NMI watchdog: Enabled. Permanently consumes one hw-PMU counter.
 
  stops after a while (after ~10-30 iterations, with fluctuations).
  Maybe watchdog_cpus needs to be atomic ?

That's correct as this again is affected by the asynchronous nature of the
smpboot thread unpark mechanism.

CPU 0				CPU1			CPU2
write(watchdog_thresh, 6)	
  stop()
    park()
  update()
  start()
    unpark()
				thread->unpark()
				  cnt++;
write(watchdog_thresh, 5)				thread->unpark()
  stop()
    park()			thread->park()
				   cnt--;		  cnt++;
  update()
  start()
    unpark()

That's not a functional problem, it just affects the informational message.

Convert watchdog_cpus to atomic_t to prevent the problem
Reported-and-tested-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>
Signed-off-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20171101181126.j727fqjmdthjz4xk@redhat.com