[SunRescue] Logging memory errors

[Maarten Deen]

> It's more a problem on how intel boxes report ecc errors.  As I understand
> it they arn't very verbose, and NMI's could mean other things.

Specifically, NMI stands for Non Maskable Interrupt, AFAIK.

Maarten

> 
> On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Dave Reader wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Paul Khoury wrote:
> > 
> > > On Mon, 04 Dec 2000 21:12:14 -0800, Paul Theodoropoulos wrote:
> > > 
> > > >Dec  4 20:40:31 e4500a unix:  Corrected MemMod Board 0 J3800
> > > >Dec  4 20:40:31 e4500a unix:    ECC Data Bit 11 was corrected
> > > >
> > > >I refuse to use anything but SPARC running Solaris for core 
> > > >infrastructure. Nothing is as reliable.
> > > 
> > > How do the memory errors work, BTW?  Does Solaris just map around them
> > > in realtime? I'm sure Linux would have a fit if it encountered that.
> > 
> > It's ECC memory - Error Checking and Correcting.
> > 
> > It is possible for the ECC memory to seamlessly "heal" single-bit errors
> > and raise an alert that an error has occurred.
> > 
> > When this happens, it means "your memory has started to degrade and
> > introduce errors, i'm correcting single bit errors but you'd better
> > replace it before it gets worse" (ECC only protects you from a single bit
> > error, and is there only to allow you time to swap out the memory without
> > the machine crashing horribly first).
> > 
> > With Linux, at least on x86 hardware - i've not seen ECC errors under
> > Linux on Sparc - it will say something like "Received NMI - Maybe you have
> > a memory problem? .. continuing anyway" .. okay, so thats a little vague
> > (perhaps because Linux is still only just breaking out into the market
> > where ECC is the norm), but it does detect it, report it, and continue.
> > 
> > dave.
> > 
> > 
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> > http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> > 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> 


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