Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

See http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj for photo credits.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Andi Kleen on (my) x86 Machine Check Architecture

Today ran across Andi Kleen's paper
"Machine check handling on Linux",
SUSE Labs,
ak@suse.de,
Aug 2004,
along with related stuff as he has worked on Linux machine check handling over the years.

He says:

    With the Pentium Pro Intel defined a new generic x86 machine architecture[intelsys]. This architecture is implemented by modern x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD. ... The advantage of this generic architecture is that a single machine check handler can work on many different CPUs.
This makes me feel proud, but also ashamed:

(1) Proud that I was able to define, in 1991, a Machine Check Architecture that continues to be useful, with the *generic* property that Andi recognizes as one of its main goals.

(2) Ashamed that it should have taken until Andi got around to it in 2004-9 to get proper support into Linux.

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TBD: write up the lessons learned from MCA, how I would do it better, as https://semipublic.comp-arch.net/wiki/Machine_Check_Architecture
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