Hi.
I have ECC RAM on my system and I wanted to check it, so (because
there doesn't seem to be any Linux ECC support for my P5WD2
motherboard) I wrote my own kernel module[#] to interrogate the
northbridge. I was a little annoyed to find that the northbridge had
reported an ECC error, and a multi-bit uncorrectable error at that!,
at memory location 0x3ffe5000. I cleared the error flag and ran
multiple checks and couldn't find any other error, so I stared
thinking about this address I realized that it was very near the top
of memory (I have 1GB RAM). In fact, it is reported as "reserved" by
Linux:
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000000e4000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000003ff80000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000003ff80000 - 000000003ff8e000 (ACPI data)
BIOS-e820: 000000003ff8e000 - 000000003ffe0000 (ACPI NVS)
BIOS-e820: 000000003ffe0000 - 0000000040000000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000ffb00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
Now /dev/mem won't work that far so I can't read what's there, but I
suspect there's something very strange in that place and the ECC error
reported by the northbridge is not really an error. Interestingly
enough, I always get an error at 0x3ffe5000 when I boot, and then
later on I get an error at 0x3fff0580. This is consistent: I always
get those "errors" at the same memory locations, and they're always
multiple-bit errors.
So here are my questions:
* What does "reserved" mean in the BIOS physical RAM table? Reserved
by whom? Who owns my memory? Do all my base are belong to him?
* What's the simplest way, under Linux (whether in userspace or in
kernel), to read the contents of a _physical_ memory location, given
that /dev/mem won't do it:
vega david ~ $ sudo dd if=/dev/mem bs=4096 count=1 skip=262117 of=/tmp/page
dd: reading `/dev/mem': Bad address
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 0.000118 seconds (0 bytes/sec)
* Why am I getting ECC errors in this strange place, and only there?
Do I need to worry about them? (I mean, if it's something strange
like memory-mapped I/O I would expect the northbridge to know about it
and not report an error!)
--
David A. Madore
([email protected],
http://www.madore.org/~david/ )
[#] Source available on demand - it's pretty damn ugly, I wouldn't
want Mr. Torvalds to see it!
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