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MNI occuring on a regular basis



Hi all,

Lately, I installed a SBlive! on my machine at home. Since then, I'm
getting on a routine basis the following message at my "xconsole":
" Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue.
You probably have hardware problem with your RAM chips"

O.K., i've made a little research before I wrote this one. This is
shortly what i've fished:
NMI is "Non Maskable Interrupt", which was used on older SIMM chips to
report that a parity problem has occurred in those RAM chips. It is also
used on some hardware to report something like - going into power saving
mode, or similar announcment.
This message is generated through the kernel (printk())

These messages appear usually when the system is idle, al least
partially idle.(as far as I could check it) . One thing's for sure -
when the system is idle, and i wake it up - there's always a queue of
messages in my xconsole reported at intervals of 3-4 minutes.

Does anyone have an idea of what could it be ? my DIMM (and its DIMM,
not SIMM...) ram wasn't changed lately, and my SBlive doesn't have
detachable RAM chips on it. 
Could it be that my SBlive internal RAM chips are defected, or is it
reporting those messages with regard to some power saving mode its going
into ?
Can it be anything else anyway ?

TIA,
Boaz.


below are some quotes of info I got from the web:
==========
>> NMI is the Non-Maskable Interrupt.   Back in the days when most PCs
>> included parity memory this interrupt was used to signal a memory
>> parity fault or other serious problem, but the interrupt service
>> routine would identify the problem.  I don't know what it might be
>> used for nowadays or why the reason for it remains unidentified.

----

>>That depends what the NMI is triggered by.
>>The usual use for that signal was to signal a parity error on
>>with-parity RAM, and if that's what's happening, then there are
>>basically two cures:

>>1. Configure your system to say that it's using no-parity RAM.

>>2. Replace the no-parity SIMM(s) with with-parity SIMM(s).

>>On some systems with APM (Advanced Power Management) features, NMI is
>>used to signal that the system is going into or coming out of power
>>saving mode, in which case the above won't help. You'd need to look at
>>the kernel power saving settings or tweak your hardware settings to
>>not use power saving mode in this case...

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