Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757889Ab1EaRkw (ORCPT ); Tue, 31 May 2011 13:40:52 -0400 Received: from e28smtp07.in.ibm.com ([122.248.162.7]:42146 "EHLO e28smtp07.in.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757466Ab1EaRkv (ORCPT ); Tue, 31 May 2011 13:40:51 -0400 Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 23:10:43 +0530 From: "K.Prasad" To: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List , Andi Kleen , "Luck, Tony" , Vivek Goyal , kexec@lists.infradead.org, anderson@redhat.com Subject: Re: [RFC Patch 4/6] PANIC_MCE: Introduce a new panic flag for fatal MCE, capture related information Message-ID: <20110531174043.GA2000@in.ibm.com> Reply-To: prasad@linux.vnet.ibm.com References: <20110526170722.GB23266@in.ibm.com> <20110526171521.GD17988@in.ibm.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2251 Lines: 48 On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:04:06AM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > "K.Prasad" writes: > > > PANIC_MCE: Introduce a new panic flag for fatal MCE, capture related information > > > > Fatal machine check exceptions (caused due to hardware memory errors) will now > > result in a 'slim' coredump that captures vital information about the MCE. This > > patch introduces a new panic flag, and new parameters to *panic functions > > that can capture more information pertaining to the cause of crash. > > > > Enable a new elf-notes section to store additional information about the crash. > > For MCE, enable a new notes section that captures relevant register status > > (struct mce) to be later read during coredump analysis. > > There may be a reason to pass everything struct mce through 5 layers of > code but right now it looks like it just makes everything uglier to no > real purpose. We could have stopped with just a blank elf-note of type NT_MCE indicating an MCE triggered panic, but dumping 'struct mce' in it will help gather more useful information about the error - especially the memory address that experienced unrecoverable error (stored in mce->addr). The patch 6/6 for the 'crash' tool enabled decoding of 'struct mce' to show this information (although the sample log in patch 0/6) didn't show these benefits because 'mce-inject' tool used to soft-inject these errors doesn't populate all registers with valid contents. The idea was that when mce->addr contains physical address is shown while decoding coredump, the corresponding memory DIMM could be identified for replacement/isolation. Given that 'struct mce' isn't placed in a user-space visible file its duplicate copies have to be maintained in 'crash' (like it is done in 'mcelog' tool), and that's one disadvantage. If you think that this complicates the patch, I'll start with a much 'slimmer' version (!) of the slimdump and the improvements may be contemplated iteratively. Thanks, K.Prasad -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/