Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [patch] SMP alternatives | From | Alan Cox <> | Date | Thu, 24 Nov 2005 15:15:24 +0000 |
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On Iau, 2005-11-24 at 15:22 +0100, Andi Kleen wrote: > What do you need a special driver for if the northbridge just > can do the scrubbing by itself?
You need a driver to collect and report all the ECC single bit errors to the user so that they can decide if they have problem hardware.
EDAC is more than one thing - Control response to a fatal error - Report non-fatal events for analysis/user decision making
Hardware scrubbing is good, but knowing the rate of non-fatal errors and the trend in rate of errors is essential to planning and management of systems.
> On the modern systems I'm familiar with it's an machine check (although > not necessarily a recoverable one and there might be other bad > side effects)
The Intel I have looked at generates MCE if the L2/L1/bus parity errors but not on a RAM ECC error as that is memory controller not CPU level. That usually asserts NMI. Same for most older chips PIII/AMD Athlon etc
> > The -mm EDAC code works on the basic assumption that unrecovered ECC is > > a system halter although that is configurable. > > I don't know what you could do over the default code for K8 at least. > And on modern Intel server chipsets I would expect it also to not > be needed.
Varies a lot again. Hopefully that'll simplify as/when/if Intel put the memory controller on CPU.
Alan
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