Re: Re: RFC: MCA/MCE concept

[Gavin Maltby <Gavin.Maltby@Sun.COM>]

Hi,

Apologies for the screwy quoting below - I did not receive the first half of this
thread so it's been forwarded to me.

>>>
>>>   - Dom0 got enough CEs so that UEs are very likely to happen in order
>>>      to "circumvent" UEs.

The greatest rewards here are in syndrome/row/column/bank analysis of the
error stream.  Where something like a bad pin produces tonnes of CEs
they are always on the same bit and your chance of a UE is that of a random
radiation type CE colliding within the set of ECC checkwords being undermined
by that pin - not very high.  On the other hand if we're seeing repeated
distinct syndromes from the same chip-select (or chip-select in a pair)
then there is a good chance they could collide "soon" - our data is that
this combination predicts a UE within hours to a few days.  If you have
row/column/bank decoding you can also perform further analysis of the
error source and assess the chances of a collision that would produce a UE.

That example has DIMM memory in mind, but similar approaches apply to
cache memory where it is ECC protected and so on.

>>>   - Possible operations on a DomU
>>>        - save/restore DomU
>>>        - (live-)migrate DomU to a different physical machine
>>>        - etc.
>> Very heavy-weight operations, which I think are unlikely to succeed if
>> you already suspect the system's going to suffer a UE soon.

As above, some predictors can give you hours to a few days warning of a UE.

Gavin