Monday, June 8, 2009

mcelog

At work, I have to decode kernel panics on 64-bit systems occasionally.

`mcelog´ it seems could be a useful tool.

mcelog decodes machine check events (hardware errors) on x86-64 machines running a 64-bit Linux kernel. It should be run regularly as a cron job on any x86-64 Linux system (if it is not in the default packages on your x86-64 distribution, please complain to your distributor). It can also decode machine check panic messages from console logs.
I don't have a good example on it´s usage, but on one of my systems, I noticed this in /var/log/mcelog (the cron script is setup to write to /var/log/mcelog in Fedora distributions).


MCE 0
HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
Please contact your hardware vendor
CPU 2 BANK 3 TSC c82ff2586f6b0
ADDR 219540
STATUS 942000470001010a MCGSTATUS 0

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