Re: [PATCH] EDAC/mce_amd: Add missing long names for SMCA bank types
From: Borislav Petkov
Date: Sun Oct 18 2026 - 19:08:26 EST
On Sun, Oct 18, 2026 at 06:34:31PM -0400, Yazen Ghannam wrote:
> "a" is better.
Nope.
Typing raw error values from a screen because the machine died and there's no
serial, or making a screen cap and then OCRing it and then finding another
machine to decode it on after checking the OCR did read the hex values
properly and yadda yadda...
vs
simply reading the properly decoded error decode from the screen is not
better, no matter from where you look at it.
> The same "is not updated with the latest error definitions" applies to
> the kernel.
You probably mean distro kernels. Because we try to have those updates
mainline as fast as possible.
> And it's usually easier to update tools than patch the kernel (and also
> deal with backporting, etc.).
Yah, backporting kernels has a lag in it but if the decoding updates are
upstream, distros do tend to pick them up.
> In any case, this patch isn't about error descriptions. It's only about
> adding the names for some bank types.
>
> The bank types were added three years ago. AFAIK, the missing names
> haven't been an issue. So I'm curious if this patch is actually fixing a
> problem. If so, then that's fine.
We dump the smca_long_names:
pr_emerg(HW_ERR "%s Ext. Error Code: %d", smca_get_long_name(bank_type), xec);
On that patch I objected to the Cc: <stable@xxxxxxxxxx> marker but if distro
kernels are the problem wrt decoding MCEs, we can change that and simply route
all *purely* decoding patches to stable.
Thx.
--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.
https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette