Help understanding Machine Check Exception

[Andy Green]

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David King wrote:
| I'm new at this so I'm learning my way through it and I'd appreciate any
| guidance.  My system freezes solid intermittently for no apparent
| reason.  The serial console shows a kernal panic caused by a machine
| check exception.  mcelog decodes the MCE as follows:

Heat or Memory probs would be likely candidates.  The error itself is
just telling you the end result of brain damage that happened somewhere
else and the madness was merely detected as the MCE.

If you normally run with X, move to runlevel 3 with

telinit 3

and stress the machine somehow until it dies or is apparently immortal.
~ If it still dies, then you know it isn't X or any X app.  If it's happy
without X, change to vesa video mode in xorg.conf and see if it will
still crash with X.  If not, the old X driver is looking suspect.

Monitor CPU temp with

cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature

(The THM will probably be different on your machine, look in the
directory to see what thermal zones you have)

Try running memtest86 on the thing overnight.

If your powersupply gets sand kicked in its face when it goes to the
beach, maybe that needs an upgrade, especially if you have some monster
video card.

- -Andy
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