MCA Error Recovery: HP-UX Feature for Recovering From Machine Check Aborts

HP Integrity servers provide superior reliability and availability. Nevertheless, even the best of computers can occasionally experience hardware problems that lead to unplanned downtime. Some of these problems are caused by transient events such as an alpha particle strike on memory, cache, or a processor data structure. Intel Itanium-based servers support an advanced architecture that allows the system to contain, correct, and signal machine check errors. Many of these errors are corrected by the platform without operating system intervention. When the platform cannot correct an error, it will be handed off to the operating system. To further enhance the superior reliability of HP Integrity servers, the HP-UX MCA Error Recovery feature adds the ability to recover from some of these Machine Check Aborts (MCAs).