EDAC with Debian Lenny & R710

[Alexander Dupuy]

Henry-Nicolas Tourneur asks:
> I would like to know how to use EDAC with Lenny, which module should be
> loaded ? 
> Which command should I run to check if I got no error ? 
> Does the R710 allow that kind of checks ?
>   
The kernel module edac_mc needs to be loaded, if it wasn't already 
(automatically) loaded:
  modprobe edac_mc

You should install the edac-utils package (and dependency libedac1 if 
you're not using apt or the like).

To check for errors, just run
 edac-util
(see the man page for more information)

However, on our R710 (running RHEL 5.4, not Debian Lenny, but makes no 
difference in this case) there are no EDAC drivers that support the 
system's memory controllers.  If you are *really really* adventurous, 
you could try pulling Mauro Carvalho Chehab's patches to the Linux 
kernel - just two weeks ago! but with updates from this past weekend 
(see http://archive.netbsd.se/?ml=linux-kernel&a=2009-09&t=11598929 for 
more details) - that add an i7core_edac driver for the Nehalem chipsets 
and back-porting it into whatever kernel Debian Lenny uses.

So you will probably need to wait a few weeks or even months for this to 
stabilize and get accepted into the mainstream Linux kernel, and then a 
few months more to percolate out into the various distros - and while 
I'm no expert on Debian release schedules, I'd bet this feature never 
makes it into Lenny, but maybe an update to the 6.0 "Squeeze" release.  
Unfortunately that is the price we pay for running OS!=Windows on the 
latest greatest hardware...

It would be nice though (for us RHEL people, more than for you Debian 
folks) if some of the developers at Dell could spend a bit of time 
testing out Mauro's driver,  pushing for its acceptance into the Linux 
mainstream kernel, and maybe even back-porting the patches into the 
Dell-supported (RHEL 5, SLES 11) distro kernels so that we don't all 
have to become git/kernel hackers or wait six months to get the benefit 
of Mauro's work.

@alex

-- 
mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com