Linus recently also had troubles with his development machine caused by the lack of ECC: 'I absolutely detest
the crazy industry politics and bad vendors that have made ECC memory
so "special".' https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2210.1/00691.html
ECC RAM should be a human right
61–70 of 146 posts
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#62I've never had ECC memory to my knowledge. What have I been missing out on, in practice? Can we confidently say that x% of my past BSOD were the direct consequence?
You may have been lucky enough to never experienced a bad module. But when it does happen, it can have major consequences (losing data, having to reinstall an OS). All while being totally preventable.
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#63Latest Intel desktop CPUs (i.e. i9-13900KF) supports ECC with the W680 chipset.
I wish those motherboards didn't cost $450+, I've contemplated building a home server with a 13th gen + ECC because you also get quicksync onboard.
I believe AMD APUs also have decent hardware acceleration like quicksync, for example available through VAAPI.
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#64> a multitude of bit flip errors ECC can only report >1 bit flip per word. It can't correct it. If your memory is going bad, the chance of multiple bit failure is going to be much higher than the stray bit flip from other causes (mind you, I have 32GB ECC running right now and have seen zero bit flips over 1.5 years). I'm not arguing against ECC. I have it and run it myself. But this blog post is an argument for ZFS…
> If your memory is going bad, the chance of multiple bit failure is going to be much higher When a chip starts going bad, the thousands of error reports will more than make up for the errors that slip through. Just make sure reporting is working. > Well... Well what? Those drives were lying about finishing writes, which is barely related to losing data that was written, and especially data that was written more than…
It also allows for runtime detection of bad actors attempting to flip memory.
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#65ECC has been used as an artificial market segmentation mechanism for a long time and it needs to come to an end. RAM just like SSDs and HDDs ought to have some amount of self protection against basic errors, all places where data is stored even for short periods needs this.
> ECC has been used by Intel as an artificial market segmentation mechanism
FTFY
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
When was it standard? It’s been the high-end extra thing for as long as I can remember.
I was thinking of 386 era computers and strictly speaking it was just parity RAM, not ECC. Which often led to annoyances when a single parity error would cause your whole computer to halt. Wikipedia says "By the mid-1990s, most DRAM had dropped parity checking as manufacturers felt confident that it was no longer necessary.". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_parity I'd love to read a technical deep dive on RAM relia…
Ah. I was introduced to PCs during the late 386 era, so that would explain it. I do remember parity errors.
Thanks.
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#67This is just unscientific nonsense. > Memory manufacturers assure us that desktop RAM is so reliable that it doesn’t need ECC, that the probability of bit flip events is so low that it’s not worth the extra “cost” of ECC Yea, and they are right.
I'm not very familiar with hardware architecture.
Could you explain why you disagree?
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#68I've never had ECC memory to my knowledge. What have I been missing out on, in practice? Can we confidently say that x% of my past BSOD were the direct consequence?
> I've never had ECC memory to my knowledge. What have I been missing out on, in practice? Can we confidently say that x% of my past BSOD were the direct consequence? I very highly doubt so. I remember BSOD and Guru meditations (on the Amiga) before that. Once I switched to Linux suddenly no more BSOD and very little kernel panics. I've had at times my desktop reach six months of uptime. I think bit-flips are a great…
The bitflip would also have to cause an error in logic that would result in a system lockup. That's unlikely, given that most information flowing through ram is probably data, not logic.
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#69ECC has been used as an artificial market segmentation mechanism for a long time and it needs to come to an end. RAM just like SSDs and HDDs ought to have some amount of self protection against basic errors, all places where data is stored even for short periods needs this.
> ECC has been used by Intel as an artificial market segmentation mechanism FTFY
And AMD, and Nvidia.
Re: ECC RAM should be a human right
#70I believe that is is a right. Every machine I've built in the last ~12 years had had ECC. Nobody is trying to take that ability away from me. I treat my machine as a "workstation". I run several VMs. I keep my machines for a few years. I clean the filters periodically.
Do game machines need ECC? I'd say no. They are optimized for cost-performance. The worse that can happen with a memory error is a lost game.