Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2005 20:14:46 +0100
From: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>
To: thockin@hockin.org
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>, "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
       Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, Gerd Knorr <kraxel@suse.de>,
       Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>, Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>,
       Zachary Amsden <zach@vmware.com>, Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
       Zwane Mwaikambo <zwane@arm.linux.org.uk>,
       Pratap Subrahmanyam <pratap@vmware.com>,
       Christopher Li <chrisl@vmware.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Subject: Re: [patch] SMP alternatives
Message-ID: <20051124191445.GR20775@brahms.suse.de>
References: <20051124131310.GE20775@brahms.suse.de> <m1zmnugom7.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com> <20051124133907.GG20775@brahms.suse.de> <1132842847.13095.105.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20051124142200.GH20775@brahms.suse.de> <1132845324.13095.112.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20051124145518.GI20775@brahms.suse.de> <m1psoqgk18.fsf@ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com> <20051124153635.GJ20775@brahms.suse.de> <20051124191207.GB2468@hockin.org>
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> I'm curious about that too.  Even with k8 you can get down to a
> chip-select, but that doesn't necessarily map to a DIMM in any useful way,
> unless you have some mobo knowledge.  Are we going to need a new BIOS

Yeah that's my problem.

It's not theoretical. We had cases where someone had to go 
through 10+ DIMMs on a big machine in try and error to find
out which one is wrong. Very bad situation.

[Double plus bad if it wasn't actually any of the DIMMs that were
bad, but one of the VRMs on a big Opteron - it causes all the same
symptoms as a bad DIMM :/]

> table to map chip-selects onto DIMMs? :)

I proposed something like that - best with an ASCII string
("First DIMM on the top left corner") But getting such stuff into BIOS 
is difficult and long winded.

-Andi
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