dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer) (09/08/90)
Just before I left for a long vacation this last summer, I had to move all my cards from one RT chassis to another because my motherboard went bad. After doing that, I found that the machine was crashing regularly several times a day with "panic: machine check." The crash usually happened when the machine got busy. This was bizarre because the machine had been running constantly for a year and a half without any problem. Now, while I was away, there was a AOS43 patch to ca/trap.c which under certain conditions simply printed "spurious machine check ignored". I missed any discussion which accompanied this. This apparently solves the problem of crashes, but it is the case that I'll get anywhere from 1 to 100 of these benign messages a day now, and this has occurred with my boards moved into 3 different chassis/motherboard combinations. What I don't understand is why this "suddenly" started happening, why it's continued to happen, what are the conditions under which this happens, and how it is distinguished from a "non-spurious machine check". Can anyone shed some light on this? -- Steve Dyer dyer@ursa-major.spdcc.com aka {ima,harvard,rayssd,linus,m2c}!spdcc!dyer dyer@arktouros.mit.edu, dyer@hstbme.mit.edu