Re: [PATCH 1/3] mce: Add a msg string to the MCE tracepoint

[Hidetoshi Seto]

(2012/03/02 3:28), Luck, Tony wrote:
>>> My concern is; on Sandy Bridge, is it safe to gather info about the DIMM
>>> location in/from machine check context in a reasonable time span?
>>
>> Well, what amd64_edac does is "buffer" the required lookup info so
>> whenever you get an error, you simply lookup the channel and chip select
>> - all ops which can be done in atomic context.
> 
> Yes - we could pre-read all the config space registers ahead of time and
> save them in memory (none of the values should change - except if the platform
> supports hot-plug for memory). Total is only a few Kbytes. Then decode in
> machine check context is both safe, and fast.

To sort out my thought:

 - First of all, OS gathers info about physical location of DIMMs from
   DMI/ACPI/PCI etc., before enabling MCE mechanism.
 - Make a kind of "physical memory location table" on memory buffer,
   to ease mapping a physical address to the location of a DIMM module
   and/or chip which have the memory cell pointed by the address.
    - It would be better to have a well organized table rather than
      having a raw copy of config space etc.
    - Likewise it will also nice if we can map logical processor numbers
      to the location of physical sockets on motherboard.
    - Happy if user can refer the table via sysfs.
    - Allow updating the table if the platform supports hot-plug.
 - Once MCE is enabled, handler can refer the table on memory to
   determine an erroneous device which should be replaced.

This storyline up to here is reasonable and acceptable, I think.

Then now it is clear that the last point where I feel uneasy about is
putting a string into the ring buffer instead of binary bits like index
of location table.  Please use binary (or "binary + string") to tell
the error location to userland.


Thanks,
H.Seto

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