mcelong reports AMD DRAM Parity Error?

[Bill Bogstad]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 10:44 AM, Jarod Wilson <jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Nov 18, 2010, at 10:30 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>
>> Hey,
>>
>> Back onto my mcelog issue from a while ago..
>
> Crap, I apologize, I'd meant to follow up on this, and it fell
> through the cracks... So I jumped right on it right now.
>
>> I finally updated to the
>> newly released mcelog.x86_64 2:1.0-0.1.pre3.fc13 and when I ran mcelog
>> I got this output:
>>
>> HARDWARE ERROR. This is *NOT* a software problem!
>> Please contact your hardware vendor
>> MCE 0
>> CPU 0 4 northbridge TSC 24b8cb30a62636
>> MISC c008000001000000 ADDR 3c5e80c80
>>  Northbridge DRAM Parity Error
>>       bit34 = err cpu2
>>       bit43 = L3 subcache in error bit 1
>>       bit46 = corrected ecc error
>>       bit59 = misc error valid
>>  memory/cache error 'generic read mem transaction, generic transaction, level generic'
>> STATUS 9c294834001d011b MCGSTATUS 0
>> SOCKETID 0
>>
>> Does this mean I have a busted CPU?  Or busted RAM?
>
> RAM. However, its not a fatal error, its simply a corrected
> ecc error. I'm told this is all a single event here, and the
> event was the corrected ecc error, anyway. So you might want
> to replace some memory at some point, but hey, its ecc memory
> doing what its designed to do here.

Could be neither actually.    Random radiation can flip bits occasionally...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error

Unfortunately, over the years I've never seen any numbers on what the
expected rate for such radiation induced memory errors should be.

Bill Bogstad