One of things I love about Solaris is its ability to generate a core file when a system panics. The core files are an invaluable resource for figuring out what caused a host to panic, and are often the first thing OS vendor support organizations will request when you open a support case. Linux provides [...]
I wrote about Linux mcelog utility a few weeks back, and described how it can be used to monitor the /dev/mcelog device for machine check exception (MCEs). By default, the Linux kernel will check for MCEs every five minutes. The polling interval is defined in the sysfs check_interval entry, which you can view with cat: [...]
When I first began using Linux quite some time ago, I remember thinking to myself WTF is all this stuff in /boot. There were files related to grub, a file called vmlinuz, and several ASCII text files with cool sounding names. After reading through the Linux kernel HOWTO, the /boot directory layout all came together, [...]
As you may surmise from several of my recent posts, I have been doing a ton of Linux virtualization (Xen, KVM, openvz) testing. In the case of KVM, numerous bug fixes are integrated into each kernel release, so it’s often beneficial to stick to the bleeding edge kernels (though great for testing, I wouldn’t feel [...]
In my previous post, I mentioned how the mcelog utility can be used to detect hardware problems. Mcelog relies on the /dev/mcelog device being present, which requires the kernel to be built with the following options: CONFIG_X86_MCE=y CONFIG_X86_MCE_INTEL=y CONFIG_X86_MCE_AMD=y CONFIG_X86_MCE_THRESHOLD=y To enable these, you can select the following options once you run ‘make menuconfig’: [*] [...]
I have been using memtest86 and a custom built hardware testing image based on OpenSolaris, FMA and sun VTS for quite some time, and have had fantastic success with them. I just learned that the Linux kernel developers added built-in memory testing support to the Linux 2.6.26 kernel: “Memtest is a commonly used tool for [...]
