Northbridge Machine Check during package installation (Fedora yarrow)

[Mike A. Harris]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, Stefan Schroepfer wrote:

>Each time I tried to install from my CDs, having md5sum-checked isos,
>having verified installation media, having double-checked hard-disk
>partitions to install to, I come across an error, which occurs at random
>times during package installation, and which looks like this:
>
>Northbridge Machine Check exception %016lx %lx,
>     (unsigned long)nbstatus, error_code
>Uncorrectable condition
>Unrecoverable condition
>
>(Pseudocde for now stolen from
>http://www.iglu.org.il/lxr/source/arch/x86_64/kernel/bluesmoke.c,
>error_code beeing 0 and nbstatus having a value I can provide tomorrow,
>if that matters)
>
>After searching for a while I got the impression that faulty hardware
>is likely the cause of such kind of problems. Any more hints? What
>exactly is likely to be faulty (more details that I could tell my
>hardware vendor, besides that "something" is faulty).
>
>Is there any more insight, what else could could cause this problem
>(maybe nonetheless a kernel issue, are there any news?).

At a first glance, I would suspect faulty hardware also.  It is 
possible it could be caused by other things as well though.


>As a side note: Is there a better place to ask such a question than
>on amd64-list?

I don't know what our official list charter is for amd64-list, 
but anything AMD64 related would seem to be reasonable disussion 
topic IMHO.  Questions such as yours might be on the minds of 
others with the same hardware perhaps, so any answers that might 
arise, could potentially help many people, as well as being 
archived for the future for others to find.

I hope you can track down the problem, however I'm sorry I don't
have any better advice to offer than the above.  ;o/  Perhaps 
someone else has heard of such an issue with the same hardware, 
and it isn't an isolated problem.

Best wishes.
Mike


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat