From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Description of problem: We have several IBM X380 itaniums. I have installed RedHat 7.2 ia64. Several times, when booting, sometime after is starts to uncompress the kernel, I get a message: ia64_log_get : Failed to retrieve SAL error record type 3 ia64_mca_cpe_int_handler : received interrupt. vector = 0x1e These messages continue to scroll across the console, causing me to reset the system. IBM told me that Intel acknowledges this as an issue and is working with RedHat on this problem. I would appreciate if your would inform me if RedHat comes up with a fix for this. I expect that IBM will respond but in round about manner. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot IBM x380 with stock kernel for RH 7.2 2. 3. Actual Results: ia64_log_get : Failed to retrieve SAL error record type 3 ia64_mca_cpe_int_handler : received interrupt. vector = 0x1e scrolls across the screen ad infinitum. Expected Results: The kernel should have booted. Additional info:
Are these 1 cpu machines ?
these are 4 proc machines with as much as 16GB of memory
Ok then it's a new problem I've not seen before and we're not talkling to Intel or IBM about it yet.... mca stands for "machine check architecure", eg self-diagnosis...... if something goes wrong there, well..... MCA got introduced in "recent" firmware; and I think it can be turned of in the firmware settings screen too.
Your last comment helped us to understand the root of the problem further, although we still have the problem. It seems that MCA is the method that the hardware talks to the syslog about what hardware problems are happening. It seems every so often that the SAL is not ready/available at bootup, the MCA code can't read the SAL aso it fails and gives us these errors. In the BIOS, there is a menu for Event Log that has some of the following options: (from my memory) Enable/disable SERR Enable/disable PERR Enable/disable HERR Clear all MCA records enable/disable more that I can't recall..... We tried the clear MCA records, and it didn't do anything different. What are the SERR, PERR, HERR, etc.?
We noticed there was a project on SourceForge that is supposed to clean up MCA logging -- IA64 Linux MCA recovery. Should we look into upgrading our kernel and applying this patch?
I'm no expert on MCA but... upgrading an ia64 kernel will be "fun"... MCA's just shouldn't happen; it's hardware problems ;(
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/