[Qemu-devel] [Bug 1307225] Re: Running a virtual machine on a Haswell system produces machine check events

[Thomas]

I got a new Haswell based system a few days ago. It has been running
fine without warnings but today I started a VirtualBox VM and got a MCE
soon afterwards. "MCA: Internal parity error" like everyone else. From
reading this bug and the vmware link in the first post it seems like
this problem occurs on all virtualization solutions using hardware
acceleration on Haswell based systems. It happens on Qemu, Virtualbox
and Vmware and it happens on both Linux and Windows.

Do anyone have connections within Intel and can pull some strings to
have them look at this? It looks like the MCE is always non fatal but
perhaps there are other unknown side effects. A microcode update might
solve it.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1307225

Title:
  Running a virtual machine on a Haswell system produces machine check
  events

Status in QEMU:
  New

Bug description:
  I'm running a virtual Windows SBS 2003 installation on a Xeon E3
  Haswell system running Gentoo Linux. First, I used Qemu 1.5.3 (the
  latest stable version on Gentoo). I got a lot of machine check events
  ("mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged") in dmesg that
  always looked like (using mcelog):

  Hardware event. This is not a software error.
  MCE 0
  CPU 3 BANK 0
  TIME 1397455091 Mon Apr 14 07:58:11 2014
  MCG status:
  MCi status:
  Corrected error
  Error enabled
  MCA: Internal parity error
  STATUS 90000040000f0005 MCGSTATUS 0
  MCGCAP c09 APICID 6 SOCKETID 0
  CPUID Vendor Intel Family 6 Model 60

  I found this discussion on the vmware community:
  https://communities.vmware.com/thread/452344

  It seems that this is (at least partly) caused by the Qemu machine. I
  switched to Qemu 1.7.0, the first version to use "pc-i440fx-1.7". With
  this version, the errors almost disappeared, but from time to time, I
  still get machine check events. Anyways, they so not seem to affect
  neither the vm, nor the host.

  The Haswell machine has been set up and running for several days
  without a single error message. They only appear when the VM is
  running. so I think this is actually some problem with the Haswell
  architecture (and not a real hardware error).

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