Re: New bluesmoke patch available, implements MCE-without-MCA support

From: H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
Date: Wed Nov 15 2000 - 20:02:03 EST


Mikael Pettersson wrote:
>
> On 15 Nov 2000, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> >This implements support for MCE on chips which don't support MCA (in
> >addition to enabling MCA for non-Intel chips, like Athlon, which
> >supports MCA.)
> >
> >I would appreciate it if people who have chips with MCE but no MCA --
> >this includes older AMD chips and some Cyrix chips at the very least
> >-- would please be so kind and try this out.
>
> I have a K6-III which announces MCE but not MCA, so I was going to
> test this on that machine.
>
> However, both the K6-III manual and the K6 BIOS guide state quite
> clearly that the K6 family only has a "stub" MCE implementation.
> The MCE capability is announced, there are two MCE-related MSRs,
> and there is a CR4.MCE flag, but none of it actually _does_ anything.
>
> The new CPU detection code should probably clear FEATURE_MCE for K6 CPUs.
> (We might consider it an AMD bug, but in their defense, they do state
> that the stub implementation was done for "compatibility" reasons.)
>

Actually, that's just fine. It won't cause any harm; all that will mean
is that it will never raise #MC. Remember that a CPU should, in proper
operation, never raise #MC anyway!

Their implementation is a legal (albeit useless) implementation of MCE.
No need to special-case it.

        -hpa

-- 
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt
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