Current PowerPC kernels have a number of flaws in their machine check handling. The first fault is that they raise a SIGSEGV exception if the machine check occurs during user mode code. Many causes of machine check are not directly related to the current process. For example, on some platforms a PCI parity error detected while a PCI bus master writes into memory will cause a machine check. On some platforms a parity error reading data from the L2 cache in order to write it out to memory will cause a machine check.

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