To quote Alan Cox:

The default Linux behaviour on an NMI of either memory or unknown is to
continue operation. For many environments such as scientific computing
it is preferable that the box is taken out and the error dealt with than
an uncorrected parity/ECC error get propogated.

A small number of systems do generate NMI's for bizarre random reasons
such as power management so the default is unchanged. In other respects
the new proc/sys entry works like the existing panic controls already in
that directory.

This is separate to the edac support - EDAC allows supported chipsets to
handle ECC errors well, this change allows unsupported cases to at least
panic rather than cause problems further down the line.
Signed-off-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>