kernel-ark/Documentation/x86/x86_64/machinecheck
Andi Kleen 3c0797925f x86, mce: switch x86 machine check handler to Monarch election.
On Intel platforms machine check exceptions are always broadcast to
all CPUs.  This patch makes the machine check handler synchronize all
these machine checks, elect a Monarch to handle the event and collect
the worst event from all CPUs and then process it first.

This has some advantages:

- When there is a truly data corrupting error the system panics as
  quickly as possible. This improves containment of corrupted
  data and makes sure the corrupted data never hits stable storage.

- The panics are synchronized and do not reenter the panic code
  on multiple CPUs (which currently does not handle this well).

- All the errors are reported. Currently it often happens that
  another CPU happens to do the panic first, but reports useless
  information (empty machine check) because the real error
  happened on another CPU which came in later.
  This is a big advantage on Nehalem where the 8 threads per CPU
  lead to often the wrong CPU winning the race and dumping
  useless information on a machine check.  The problem also occurs
  in a less severe form on older CPUs.

- The system can detect when no CPUs detected a machine check
  and shut down the system.  This can happen when one CPU is so
  badly hung that that it cannot process a machine check anymore
  or when some external agent wants to stop the system by
  asserting the machine check pin.  This follows Intel hardware
  recommendations.

- This matches the recommended error model by the CPU designers.

- The events can be output in true severity order

- When a panic happens on another CPU it makes sure to be actually
  be able to process the stop IPI by enabling interrupts.

The code is extremly careful to handle timeouts while waiting
for other CPUs. It can't rely on the normal timing mechanisms
(jiffies, ktime_get) because of its asynchronous/lockless nature,
so it uses own timeouts using ndelay() and a "SPINUNIT"

The timeout is configurable. By default it waits for upto one
second for the other CPUs.  This can be also disabled.

From some informal testing AMD systems do not see to broadcast
machine checks, so right now it's always disabled by default on
non Intel CPUs or also on very old Intel systems.

Includes fixes from Ying Huang
Fixed a "ecception" in a comment (H.Seto)
Moved global_nwo reset later based on suggestion from H.Seto
v2: Avoid duplicate messages

[ Impact: feature, fixes long standing problems. ]

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Hidetoshi Seto <seto.hidetoshi@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
2009-06-03 14:45:12 -07:00

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Configurable sysfs parameters for the x86-64 machine check code.
Machine checks report internal hardware error conditions detected
by the CPU. Uncorrected errors typically cause a machine check
(often with panic), corrected ones cause a machine check log entry.
Machine checks are organized in banks (normally associated with
a hardware subsystem) and subevents in a bank. The exact meaning
of the banks and subevent is CPU specific.
mcelog knows how to decode them.
When you see the "Machine check errors logged" message in the system
log then mcelog should run to collect and decode machine check entries
from /dev/mcelog. Normally mcelog should be run regularly from a cronjob.
Each CPU has a directory in /sys/devices/system/machinecheck/machinecheckN
(N = CPU number)
The directory contains some configurable entries:
Entries:
bankNctl
(N bank number)
64bit Hex bitmask enabling/disabling specific subevents for bank N
When a bit in the bitmask is zero then the respective
subevent will not be reported.
By default all events are enabled.
Note that BIOS maintain another mask to disable specific events
per bank. This is not visible here
The following entries appear for each CPU, but they are truly shared
between all CPUs.
check_interval
How often to poll for corrected machine check errors, in seconds
(Note output is hexademical). Default 5 minutes. When the poller
finds MCEs it triggers an exponential speedup (poll more often) on
the polling interval. When the poller stops finding MCEs, it
triggers an exponential backoff (poll less often) on the polling
interval. The check_interval variable is both the initial and
maximum polling interval. 0 means no polling for corrected machine
check errors (but some corrected errors might be still reported
in other ways)
tolerant
Tolerance level. When a machine check exception occurs for a non
corrected machine check the kernel can take different actions.
Since machine check exceptions can happen any time it is sometimes
risky for the kernel to kill a process because it defies
normal kernel locking rules. The tolerance level configures
how hard the kernel tries to recover even at some risk of
deadlock. Higher tolerant values trade potentially better uptime
with the risk of a crash or even corruption (for tolerant >= 3).
0: always panic on uncorrected errors, log corrected errors
1: panic or SIGBUS on uncorrected errors, log corrected errors
2: SIGBUS or log uncorrected errors, log corrected errors
3: never panic or SIGBUS, log all errors (for testing only)
Default: 1
Note this only makes a difference if the CPU allows recovery
from a machine check exception. Current x86 CPUs generally do not.
trigger
Program to run when a machine check event is detected.
This is an alternative to running mcelog regularly from cron
and allows to detect events faster.
monarch_timeout
How long to wait for the other CPUs to machine check too on a
exception. 0 to disable waiting for other CPUs.
Unit: us
TBD document entries for AMD threshold interrupt configuration
For more details about the x86 machine check architecture
see the Intel and AMD architecture manuals from their developer websites.
For more details about the architecture see
see http://one.firstfloor.org/~andi/mce.pdf