This patchset is to handle MCA notify_die events on IA64. When MCA occurs, errors are set in the PROM. If these errors are not reset, the PROM would restart the system at some point and thus OS is not able to kexec the kdump kernel. To take care of this situation, a new machine vector is needed to inform PROM that we are about to start a kdump kernel. The SN code for this machine vector will issue a SAL call. This patchset includes two parts. 1/2 The first one is to add a machine vector notifying the platform-specific code that a kexec is about to occur and the related SN code. 2/2 The second part is to add MCA notify_die events handling. There is a concern that if there is a hardware failure which cause the MCA, the second kernel may encounter the same MCA. That is possible. However, from past experience on IA64 using LKCD, dumps are successful after most MCAs. There is no guarantee, of course. [Jack Steiner wrote:] IA64, at least on the SN platforms, reports MCAs for many problems that are actually software bugs. Examples include failures like references to non-existant memory, protected memory, etc. A crash dump should work ok after these types of MCAs because the crashdump kernel will usually not reference the same bad addresses. This (at least on SN) is the most common cause of a MCA with the exception of MCAs caused by double bit memory errors. Dumps after double bit memory errors are usually successful because the bad page is usually not part of the dump. - Jay Lan Patches against 2.6.18, apply on top of kexec-kdump-ia64-2.6.18.patch and Fix-OS_INIT-handle-IA64 patch from Zou Nan hai. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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