Re: [PATCH 8/8] ACPI / trace: Add trace interface for eMCA driver

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <m.chehab@samsung.com>]

Em Wed, 16 Oct 2013 20:47:05 +0000
"Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@intel.com> escreveu:

> > Also, I suspect that, if an error happens to affect more than one DIMM
> > (e. g. part of the location is not available for a given error),
> > that the DIMM label will also not be properly shown.
> 
> There are a couple of cases here:
> 
> 1) There are a number of DIMMs behind some flaky h/w that introduces errors
> that are apparently blamed onto each of those DIMMs.
> 
>   All we can do here is statistical correlations ... each error is reported independently,
>   it is up to some entity to notice the higher level topology connection. There is enough
>   information in the UEFI error record to do that (assuming that BIOS filled out the
>   necessary fields).
> 
> 2) There is a single reported error that spans more than one DIMM.
> 
>   This can happen with a UC error in a pair of lock-step DIMMs.  Since the error is UC
>   we know that two (or more) bits are bad.  But we have no way to tell whether the
>   bad bits came from the same DIMM, or one bit from each (because we don't know
>   which bits are bad - if we knew that, we could fix them :-)   The eMCA case should
>   log two subsections in this case - one for each of the lockstep DIMMs involved. A user
>   seeing this will should probably just replace both DIMMs to be safe.  If they wanted to
>   diagnose further they should swap DIMMs around so this pair are no longer lockstepped
>   and see if they start seeing correctable errors from each of the split pair - or if the UC
>   errors move with one or the other of the DIMMs

There's also a third case: mirrored memories.

As a matter of coherency with hw-based reports, for cases (2) and (3),
the error tracing should be displaying both memories that are affected
by a UC error (or a CE error on a mirrored address space).

Regards,
Mauro