Arch Linux

altermetax

Member

Registered: 2016-03-19

Posts: 76

MCE errors and system instability

Hi,
I have an Arch Linux system which I installed on a new PC in September 2023, and it has never had any issue. Today multiple applications (including Firefox, Chromium, the KDE System Monitor and bash itself) randomly seem to be crashing, and in the journal I'm getting MCE errors in this form:

mce: [Hardware Error]: CPU 3: Machine Check: 0 Bank 0: 8400010000040150
mce: [Hardware Error]: TSC 167a8799ef ADDR 3ffffff8313c2af
mce: [Hardware Error]: PROCESSOR 0:b0671 TIME 1731622656 SOCKET 0 APIC 9 microcode 12b

This error appears at random intervals (though fairly often), with some of the numbers varying (including the CPU number, which alternates between 2 and 3).

I ran a memtest86 and the memory seems to be fine.

I used rasdaemon to get more info about the error and I got the following:

           <...>-6144  [002] .....     0.000123 mce_record <CANT FIND FIELD v_data>2024-11-15 02:02:55 +0100 bank=0, status= 8400004000040150, Instruction CACHE Level-0 Instruction-Fetch Error, mci=Corrected_error, mca=Instruction CACHE Level-0 Instruction-Fetch Error, cpu_type= Intel generic architectural MCA, cpu= 2, socketid= 0, addr= 3ffffffb13142a0, mcgstatus=0, mcgcap= c16, apicid= 8, microcode= 12b

What does this mean? Is the CPU faulty? The temperatures seem to be fine, and I ran several stress-ng tests successfully.

Note that this never happened before and I didn't even have intel-ucode installed until now, so I doubt it could've been an update of that (though installing it didn't fix anything). Also, I tried running an Arch Live USB (2024-11-01) and the error appears there too.

[Edit] replacing the kernel with LTS doesn't fix the issue.

Thank you for any response.

Last edited by altermetax (2024-11-15 01:47:45)

afader

Member

Registered: 2013-09-12

Posts: 171

Re: MCE errors and system instability

That's strange. I got an mce error for the first time too yesterday

altermetax

Member

Registered: 2016-03-19

Posts: 76

Re: MCE errors and system instability

I also noticed another user having an MCE very recently in this post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=300954
However they didn't seem to notice any system instability in addition to that.