bluesmoke, machine check exception, reboot

[Corin Hartland-Swann]

Hi there,

I have a Dual PIII-1000 running 2.4.18, and am occasionally getting the
following error:

> CPU 1: Machine Check Exception: 000000000000000004
> Bank 1: f200000000000115
> Kernel panic: CPU context corrupt

This results in a hard lock (unable to use magic SysRQ key to sync or
reboot, etc). I located these errors in arch/i386/kernel/bluesmoke.c in
the function intel_machine_check(). From what I have read on lkml it is
probably a result of the processor overheating and causing errors.

I intend to add another fan to stop this from happening, but in the
meantime is there anything I can do to get the machine to reboot after the
panic? After the last time that this happened, I set
/proc/sys/kernel/panic to 10, but it hasn't happened since then so I can't
tell whether it will work. The error listed above is the entire error
before the machine fails - there is no register dump or anything after
that.

Do you think it will manage to reboot with a hopelessly confused
processor?

Thanks,

Corin

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