Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 10:06:14 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu> To: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ecc on i386 Message-ID: <15280.36694.786500.622681@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> In-Reply-To: <20010925012041.CC9613808@overcee.netplex.com.au> References: <15279.54029.454089.299807@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <20010925012041.CC9613808@overcee.netplex.com.au>
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Peter Wemm writes: Thanks for your description of how ECC is reported on PCs. That was very, very helpful. > The Tyan Thunder 2510 BIOS even disables ECC -> NMI routing so you have to > go to quite a bit of trouble to reprogram the serverworks chipset to > actually generate NMI's so that you can find out if something got trashed. Is that the He-Sl or the LE-3 chipset? Is that code available? I have some LE-3 based boxes which I'd like be certain DTRT. Unlike my wife's Dual Athlon, these boxes have nothing in their BIOS pertaining to ECC error reporting. (Supermicro 370-DLE) > Our NMI / ECC handling really really sucks in FreeBSD. Consider: > - i686_pagezero - reads before writing in order to minimize cache snooping > traffic in SMP systems. However, if it gets an NMI while trying to check > if the cache line is already zero, it will take the entire machine down > instead of just zeroing the line. > - NFS / VM / bio: when they get an NMI while trying to copy data that is > clean and backed by storage, they take the machine down instead of trying > to recover and re-read the page. > - userland.. If userland gets an NMI, the machine dies instead of killing > the process (or rereading a text page etc if possible) > - our NMI handlers are a festering pile of excretement. They dont have > the code to 'ack' the NMI so it isn't possible to return after recovery. > - and so on. Well, at least we take the machine down, which is a heck of a lot better than ignoring the problem, which is really all that I was hoping for. Thanks again, Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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