Checking Out Machine Check Exception (MCE) Errors in Linux

Machine Check Exception Error Linux

I recently reviewed ODROID-H2 with Ubuntu 19.04, and noticed some errors messages in the kernel log of the Intel Celeron J4105 single board computer while running SBC-Bench benchmark:


I did not know what do make of those errors, but I was told I would get more details with mcelog which can be installed as follows:


There’s just one little problem: it’s not in Ubuntu 19.04 repository, and a bug report mentions mcelog is not deprecated, and remove from Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic onwards. Instead, we’re being told the mcelog package functionality has been replaced by rasdaemon.

But before looking into the utilities, let’s find out what Machine Check Exception (MCE) is all about from ArchLinux Wiki:

A machine check exception (MCE) is an error generated by the CPU when the CPU detects that a hardware error or failure has occurred.

Machine check exceptions (MCEs) can occur for a variety of reasons ranging from undesired or out-of-spec voltages from the power supply, from cosmic radiation flipping bits in memory DIMMs or the CPU, or from other miscellaneous faults, including faulty software triggering hardware errors.

Hardware error should probably be taken seriously. Let’s investigate how to run the tools. First, I try to install mcelog from Ubuntu 16.04:


Oh good! It could install… Let’s run some commands:


Nothing interesting shows up here, but the file /var/log/mcelog is now up, and we can see details about the errors:


But let’s also try the recommended rasdaemon to see if we can get similar details.

Installation:


It looks like the service will not start automatically upon installation, so a reboot may be needed, or simply run the following command:


I ran a few commands and at first, it looked like some driver may be needed:


This should be related to EDAC drivers that are used for ECC memory according to a thread on Grokbase. Gemini Lake processors do not support ECC memory, so I probably don’t need it.

Running one more command to show the summary of errors, and we’re getting somewhere:


12 corrected error related to the L2 cache. We can get the full details with the appropriate command:


The status is green which means everything still works, but the utility reports a “large number of corrected cache errors”, and the “system (is) operating, but might lead to uncorrected errors soon” (See source code). It happens only a few times a day, and I’m not sure what can be done about the cache since it’s not something that can be changed as it’s embedded into the processor, maybe it’s just an issue with the processor I’m running. If somebody has an ODROID-H2 running, it may be useful to check out the kernel log with dmesg to see if you’ve got the same errors. If you do, please also indicate whether you have a board from the first batch (November 2018) or one of the new ODROID-H2 Rev B boards.

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