Meaning – The term machine check handler, refers to a feature that analyzes errors and attempts recovery by retrying the failing instruction. If retry is unsuccessful, it attempts to correct the malfunction or to isolate the affected task.
When a machine failure occurs, the machine check handler (MCH) receives control by way of a machine check interruption for a soft failure (one that was corrected by the hardware retry features: hardware instruction retry (HIR) or error checking and correction (ECC)), or for a hard failure (one that could not be corrected by HIR and ECC).
Example of usage – “To accommodate legacy operating systems that always assume MCEs are broadcast, the default behavior of the hardware is to continue to broadcast MCEs. To avoid broadcast related issues, an enlightened OS could opt-in to LMCE, which would allow the system to behave in a more robust manner.”
