Re: [PATCH]: mce: don't print "human readable" message forcorrected errors

From: Borislav Petkov
Date: Tue Apr 12 2011 - 15:57:42 EST


Adding x86 people.

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 03:22:50PM -0400, Prarit Bhargava wrote:
>
>
> On 04/12/2011 02:58 PM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 01:44:05PM -0400, Prarit Bhargava wrote:
> >
> >> Don't display the "human readable" warning for correctable errors in mce.
> >> There is no need for this information to be displayed.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Prarit Bhargava <prarit@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >>
> > Why not? This way you turn reporting of _ALL_ correctable MCEs
> > completely off and some users would actually like to run them through
> > mcelog on Intel.
> >
>
> I may be reading the code wrong ... but in the case of the
> default_decode_mce() callback there is *no* additional output displayed
> for correctable MCEs -- so the message is AFAICT useless.
>
> ie) all you see on the console log is
>
> [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged
>
> ^^^ this notifies the user that something happened with MCE
>
> [Hardware Error]: No human readable MCE decoding support on this CPU type.
>
> ^^^ this is purely informational and unnecessary
>
> [Hardware Error]: Run the message through 'mcelog --ascii' to decode.
>
> ^^^ this makes absolutely no sense. There is no message to decode.
>
> You won't see this in the case of the amd-edac because it has it's own
> callback.

Right, I see what you're sayin'. This is actually this piece:

if (!(flags & MCP_DONTLOG) && !mce_dont_log_ce) {
mce_log(&m);
atomic_notifier_call_chain(&x86_mce_decoder_chain, 0, &m);
add_taint(TAINT_MACHINE_CHECK);
}

in machine_check_poll and the reason I added it at the time was so EDAC
gets notified about DRAM ECCs. And you're right, when we're not decoding
in the kernel this message is not helping a lot. I can imagine this
filling up the logs on a machine spitting lotsa DRAM CECC errors.

I'm wondering whether dropping the printks completely is also an option
for I don't see any merit for having them anyway...

Hmmm.

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.
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