[lug] How bad is this?

[Gary Hodges]

"Timothy C. Klein" wrote:
> 
> * Gary Hodges (Gary.Hodges at noaa.gov) wrote:
> > Jan  9 12:27:06 space kernel: CPU 0: Machine Check Exception:
> > 0000000000000004
> > Jan  9 12:27:06 space kernel: Bank 0: c436c00000000833 at
> > 0000000005933c40
> > Jan  9 12:27:06 space kernel: Bank 1: f600200000000853 at
> > 0000000001f531c0
> > Jan  9 12:27:06 space kernel: Kernel panic: CPU context corrupt
> 
> I've never done real research, but I think Machine Check Exception is a
> way for the hardware (x86 only, I presume) to tell the kernel that
> something has gone wrong in hardware.
> 
> If I enable MCE in the kernel, and then overclock by Athlon, I will get
> MCE errors.  It might have even been related to cache, but I don't
> remember for sure.  Sometimes, they would not bring the system down.
> Sometimes they immediately preceded a crash.
> 
> Is is bad?  I don't know.  I wouldn't personally worry unless it
> happened again.

Thanks for your comments.  My computer has run the program for close to
24 hrs now and it hasn't had any trouble.  I did make a change in the
BIOS.  I changed the ECC setting from Check Only to Correct Error.  The
description of Correct Error is:

Set DRAM ECC Setting to Correct Errors.  Enable DRAM 1 bit error
checking and correcting in CPU/AGP/PCI.

Cheers,
Gary