Nadav Har'El wrote:
>On Sun, Jun 17, 2001, Cedar Cox wrote about "NMI?":
>
>>Mar 15 03:36:06 nanu kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but
>>trying to continue
>>Mar 15 03:36:06 nanu kernel: You probably have a hardware problem with
>>your RAM chips
>>
>>As you can see, I got this in my syslog quite a while ago.. The server's
>>been running great and this is the only time I've ever gotten a message
>>like this. Can anyone shed some light on this? What is NMI?
>>
>>-Cedar
>>
>
>NMI = "NonMaskable Interrupt". I have no idea what can be causing this
>(maybe somebody else here knows?) but the kernel's hunch might be correct :(
>
>A quick search on Google for "nonmaskable interrupt" provided with the
>following page:
> http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/res/irq/funcNMI-c.html
>
> "All of the regular interrupts that we normally use and refer to by
> number are called maskable interrupts. The processor is able to mask,
> or temporarily ignore, any interrupt if it needs to, in order to
> finish something else that it is doing. In addition, however, the PC
> has a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) that can be used for serious
> conditions that demand the processor's immediate attention. The NMI
> cannot be ignored by the system unless it is shut off specifically.
>
> When an NMI signal is received, the processor immediately drops
> whatever it was doing and attends to it. As you can imagine, this
> could cause havoc if used improperly. In fact, the NMI signal is
> normally used only for critical problem situations, such as serious
> hardware errors. The most common use of NMI is to signal a parity
> error from the memory subsystem. This error must be dealt with
> immediately to prevent possible data corruption."
>
>
But no way of actually knowing what triggered it?
Then again, cosmic rays can, theoretically, drop the voltage on the
specific CPU leg for just long enough to trigger the interrupt.
Shachar
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