Diagnosing faults in a hardware appliance. Information is read by a hand-held reader from one or more contactless tags associated with one or more components in a hardware appliance. One or more component faults and/or issues are identified based on the read information. A query is formed based on the identified one or more component faults and/or issues. A diagnostic database in the hand-held reader is queried, based on the formed query, and one or more query results are displayed in a ranked order on a display of the hand-held reader. In one aspect of the embodiments, the information read from the one or more contactless tags includes a pointer to a datastore in one of the one or more components. An ad hoc wireless network connection is established with the hardware appliance, and information in the datastore is downloaded over the connection.

Controlling a byte code transformer on detection of completion of an asynchronous command. An asynchronous command is received by an asynchronous manager from a test framework. The asynchronous command manager issues the asynchronous command to an application. A transformer is loaded for transforming byte code associated with the application in order to output one or more method names and associated timestamps of one or more method entry points and one or more method exit points. A check is made as to whether an expected result has been generated by the application. In response to determining that an expected result has been successfully generated, a time period associated with successful generation of the expected result is compared with the timestamps in order to determine matching timestamps and associated matching method names. The transformer is modified in accordance with the matching method names such that a subsequent transformation executes on byte code associated with the matching method names.

Diagnosing faults in a hardware appliance. Information is read by a hand-held reader from one or more contactless tags associated with one or more components in a hardware appliance. One or more component faults and/or issues are identified based on the read information. A query is formed based on the identified one or more component faults and/or issues. A diagnostic database in the hand-held reader is queried, based on the formed query, and one or more query results are displayed in a ranked order on a display of the hand-held reader. In one aspect of the embodiments, the information read from the one or more contactless tags includes a pointer to a datastore in one of the one or more components. An ad hoc wireless network connection is established with the hardware appliance, and information in the datastore is downloaded over the connection.

Systems, methods, and apparatuses for autonomous functional testing of a processor are described. In one example, a processor includes a plurality of processor cores that are each coupled to a respective power management agent circuit; a cache shared by the plurality of processor cores; and a control register, that when set, causes: a save of a state of a first processor core of the plurality of processor cores to storage, a transfer of control of the first processor core to a power management agent circuit of the first processor core, isolation of the first processor core from the other of the plurality of processor cores by the power management agent circuit, performance of one or more functional tests from the cache on the first processor core caused by the power management agent circuit to generate a test result, removal of the isolation of the first processor core from the other of the plurality of processor cores by the power management agent circuit, and a transfer of the control by the power management agent circuit back to the first processor core.

Techniques are described for efficiently and reliably managing machine check exceptions. For example, one embodiment of a processor comprises: a plurality of cores to execute instructions; a plurality of machine check architecture (MCA) banks coupled to the plurality of cores, each MCA bank comprising a plurality of MCA registers to store machine check data (MCD); MCD transmission circuitry to transmit a packet to an error monitoring server, the MCD transmission circuitry to generate a header of the packet using header information stored in one or more packet configuration registers and to generate a payload of the packet using at least a portion of the MCD stored in one or more of the MCA registers.

Methods, systems, and apparatuses for a memory device (e.g., DRAM) including a directed error check and scrub (ECS) procedure are described. The directed ECS procedure may include read-modify-write cycles when errors are detected in code words. In some embodiments, the memory device may perform the directed ECS procedure on a code word in which an error was previously detected (for example, in response to a read command). The directed ECS procedure described herein may facilitate correcting code word errors before too many errors, exceeding the detection and/or correction capabilities of the memory device, accumulate in the code words.