In
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
, Machine Check Architecture (MCA) is an
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...
and
AMD mechanism in which the
CPU
A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...
reports hardware errors to the
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
.
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...
's P6 and Pentium 4 family processors,
AMD's K7 and K8 family processors, as well as the Itanium architecture implement a machine check architecture that provides a mechanism for detecting and reporting hardware (machine) errors, such as: system bus errors,
ECC errors, parity errors,
cache errors, and
translation lookaside buffer
A translation lookaside buffer (TLB) is a memory cache that stores the recent translations of virtual memory to physical memory. It is used to reduce the time taken to access a user memory location. It can be called an address-translation cache. ...
errors. It consists of a set of model-specific registers (
MSRs) that are used to set up machine checking and additional banks of MSRs used for recording errors that are detected.
See also
*
Machine-check exception (MCE)
*
High availability
High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period.
Modernization has resulted in an increased reliance on these systems. F ...
(HA)
*
Reliability, availability and serviceability
Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), also known as reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM), is a computer hardware engineering term involving reliability engineering, high availability, and serviceability design. The p ...
(RAS)
*
Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA)
References
External links
Microsoft's article on Itanium's MCALinux x86 daemon for processing of machine checks
Computer architecture
x86 architecture
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