From owner-freebsd-alpha Fri Mar 31 8:56:56 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from duke.cs.duke.edu (duke.cs.duke.edu [152.3.140.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4C62B37B919; Fri, 31 Mar 2000 08:56:53 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) Received: from grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (grasshopper.cs.duke.edu [152.3.145.30]) by duke.cs.duke.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA16275; Fri, 31 Mar 2000 11:56:49 -0500 (EST) Received: (from gallatin@localhost) by grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (8.9.3/8.9.1) id LAA04508; Fri, 31 Mar 2000 11:56:18 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) From: Andrew Gallatin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2000 11:56:18 -0500 (EST) To: wilko@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: Andrew Gallatin , Dave Haney , freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Unexpected machine check In-Reply-To: <20000331181946.D1351@yedi.iaf.nl> References: <20000330201513.A1750@yedi.iaf.nl> <14563.40742.553401.107502@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <20000330225247.C3785@yedi.iaf.nl> <14563.49235.18765.586441@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <20000331181946.D1351@yedi.iaf.nl> X-Mailer: VM 6.43 under 20.4 "Emerald" XEmacs Lucid Message-ID: <14564.55164.916097.475755@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Wilko Bulte writes: > > No, a panic is the correct behaviour. A unexpected, uncorrectable > > machine check is a sign that something very, very, very bad has > > Let me clarify: drastic from the average user's perspective. If there is a > way to nuke the offending process without taking down the machine with it > (??? here) than that would be preferable. I have no idea if one can > selectively do this, and if it is worth doing in the first place. X servers > are 'special' in the sense that they are very intimate with the hardware > (right?). The problem is that machine checks can be asynchronous & may be caused by devices going insane, so, in general, the fact that a user process was running doesn't mean much. Combined with the fact that you may not know what caused a machine check, its pretty hard to be selective. A developer debugging an X server is a very special case. Cheers, Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message