[Cialug] Crashing with errors in mcelog

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 10:16 AM, David Champion <dave at dchamp.net> wrote:
>> I've seen situations similar to what you describe, where warm and cold
>> boots differ in their result. In my case the machine crashes too totally for
>> a warm boot to be possible, so i reboot by hitting the reset button on the
>> front of the case. I didn't power cycle it. But i do let the BIOS RAM checks
>> run to completion (does that zero out the RAM?). Hitting the reset button in
>> most cases *should* be equivalent to a power outage, but i know it isn't
>> *entirely* identical. The hard drives keep spinning for one thing, and i'm
>> guessing miscellaneous device memory (such as drive controllers, graphics
>> card, sound card buffer) might not be reset the same.

Right. A reset is not considered a cold boot.

> A warm boot and cold boot are pretty different. I've had situations where a
> device's firmware had to be initialized by booting into Windows to load it,
> then doing a warm boot into Linux, because the Linux driver wouldn't load
> the firmware. Don't recall off hand what that was, maybe a scsi controller,
> or a modem, and that was probably more than 10 years ago. :)
>
> There have been security notices about viruses that can survive a warm boot,
> by loading into a higher memory location in RAM.
>
> I'm sure there's probably a utility to look through RAM for interesting
> things.

See the other message I sent to the list regarding bypassing bitlocker
disk encryption. :-) It was entirely coincidental that I sent that
while in the middle of this discussion.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
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