X86 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 (solar flair), 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.
I’m not sure what distro you have installed at the present time. You may need to open your package manager and install mcelog. Taking a wild guess here, but if we presume you have Debian derivative, open a terminal session, and type
Code:
sudo apt-get install mcelog
to start the install.
Use the man page and get familiar with using the installed package to assist in your investigation.
It might be more helpful to post your problem in a Linux help Forum for your distro, rather than here. This thread should have probably been started in the Linux subform at the very least.
