xref: /illumos-gate/usr/src/man/man4d/imc.4d (revision 0250c53ad267726f2438e3c6556199a0bbf588a2)
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12.\" Copyright 2019 Joyent, Inc.
13.\"
14.Dd June 25, 2019
15.Dt IMC 4D
16.Os
17.Sh NAME
18.Nm imc
19.Nd Intel memory controller driver
20.Sh SYNOPSIS
21.Pa /dev/mc/mc*
22.Sh DESCRIPTION
23The
24.Nm
25driver interfaces with the memory controller found on certain
26generations of Intel CPUs and provides a means for decoding physical
27addresses to the corresponding memory device.
28The
29.Nm
30driver plugs into the operating systems fault management framework
31providing additional details to the system about the memory topology and
32the ability to decode physical addresses into the corresponding portion
33of the memory hierarchy.
34.Pp
35The
36.Nm
37driver is supported on the following Intel processors:
38.Bl -bullet -offset indent -width Sy
39.It
40Sandy Bridge E5 and E7 Xeon Processors
41.It
42Ivy Bridge E5 and E7 Xeon Processors
43.It
44Haswell E5 and E7 Xeon Processors
45.It
46Broadwell E5 and E7 Xeon Processors
47.It
48Skylake Xeon Scalable Processors
49.It
50Cascade Lake Xeon Scalable Processors
51.It
52Broadwell and Skylake Xeon-D processors
53.El
54.Pp
55Other lines involving the above microarchitectures, such as Xeon E3
56branded processors, are not supported as they do not provide the
57necessary hardware support.
58.Pp
59The
60.Nm
61driver is a pseudo-device driver that amalgamates all of the different
62.Xr imcstub 4D
63instances into a coherent view.
64The
65.Xr imcstub 4D
66driver attaches to all of the different PCI devices that the processor
67exposes.
68.Pp
69One challenge with the
70.Nm
71driver is the Intel Enhanced Machine Check Architecture v2
72.Pq EMCAv2 .
73Many vendors use EMCAv2 to hide memory errors from the operating system.
74Such systems limit the effectiveness of the
75.Nm
76driver and the fault management architecture by hiding correctable and
77uncorrectable DIMM errors from the operating system.
78.Pp
79The
80.Nm
81driver has a few limitations.
82Currently it does not always properly handle lockstep and mirroring
83mode, particularly in variants that are common on Skylake and newer
84systems.
85It also does not properly handle cases where Intel Optane NVDIMMs are in
86use on the memory bus.
87.Sh ARCHITECTURE
88The
89.Nm
90driver is only supported on specific Intel
91.Sy x86
92systems.
93.Sh FILES
94.Bl -tag -width Pa
95.It Pa /platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/amd64/imc
9664-bit device driver (x86).
97.It Pa /platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/imc.conf
98Driver configuration file.
99.El
100.Sh SEE ALSO
101.Xr imcstub 4D ,
102.Xr fmadm 8 ,
103.Xr fmdump 8
104