mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged

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• Security Analytics

Issue/Introduction

A Machine Check Exception (MCE) is a type of computer hardware error that occurs when a computer's central processing unit detects a hardware problem. These can be ignored if the system does not crash.  The logs may also contain "abrt-dump-oops: Found oopses: 1"

Cause

CPUs report errors detected by the CPU as machine check events (MCEs). These can be data corruption detected in the CPU caches, in main memory by an integrated memory controller, data transfer errors on the front side bus or CPU interconnect or other internal errors. Possible causes can be cosmic radiation, unstable power supplies, cooling problems, broken hardware, running systems out of specification, or bad luck.

Most errors can be corrected by the CPU by internal error correction mechanisms. Uncorrected errors cause machine check exceptions which may kill processes or panic the machine. A small number of corrected errors is usually not a cause for worry, but a large number can indicate future failure.

When a corrected or recovered error happens the x86 kernel writes a record describing the MCE into a internal ring buffer available through the /dev/mcelog device. mcelog retrieves errors from /dev/mcelog, decodes them into a human readable format and prints them on the standard output or optionally into the system log.

Resolution

If you didn't notice any crash, the error was successfully corrected.