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, e ...

, Machine Check Architecture (MCA) is an

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

mechanism in which the CPU reports hardware errors to the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

's P6 and Pentium 4 family processors,

'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 Cache, caching, or caché may refer to: Places United States * Cache, Idaho, an unincorporated community * Cache, Illinois, an unincorporated community * Cache, Oklahoma, a city in Comanche County * Cache, Utah, Cache County, Utah * Cache County ...

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 (

MSR MSR may refer to: Science and technology * Macrophage scavenger receptor, a receptor found in macrophages * Magnetic stripe reader, a device used to read magnetic stripe cards such as credit cards * M–sigma relation, in astrophysics * Mars samp ...

s) that are used to set up machine checking and additional banks of MSRs used for recording errors that are detected.

References

External links

Microsoft's article on Itanium's MCA

Linux x86 daemon for processing of machine checks
Computer architecture x86 architecture {{Compu-hardware-stub

See also

References

External links