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posted by martyb on Wednesday January 06 2021, @03:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the bit-flip-out dept.

Linus Torvalds On The Importance Of ECC RAM, Calls Out Intel's "Bad Policies" Over ECC

There's nothing quite like some fun holiday-weekend reading as a fiery mailing list post by Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator is out with one of his classical messages, which this time is arguing over the importance of ECC memory and his opinion on how Intel's "bad policies" and market segmentation have made ECC memory less widespread.

Linus argues that error-correcting code (ECC) memory "absolutely matters" but that "Intel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it's horribly bad market segmentation... Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt ECC. Seriously...The arguments against ECC were always complete and utter garbage... Now even the memory manufacturers are starting [to] do ECC internally because they finally owned up to the fact that they absolutely have to. And the memory manufacturers claim it's because of economics and lower power. And they are lying bastards - let me once again point to row-hammer about how those problems have existed for several generations already, but these f*ckers happily sold broken hardware to consumers and claimed it was an "attack", when it always was "we're cutting corners"."

Ian Cutress from AnandTech points out in a reply that AMD's Ryzen ECC support is not as solid as believed.

Related: Linus Torvalds: 'I'm Not a Programmer Anymore'
Linus Torvalds Rejects "Beyond Stupid" Intel Security Patch From Amazon Web Services
Linus Torvalds: Don't Hide Rust in Linux Kernel; Death to AVX-512
Linus Torvalds Doubts Linux will Get Ported to Apple M1 Hardware


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @06:24AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @06:24AM (#1095515)

    I saved a fortune on ECC RAM by wrapping the sticks in tin foil. No Errs so far.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @11:56AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @11:56AM (#1095574)

    How about lead as a heat sink and shield? How much does it take to shield gammas et al? Maybe Carbon matte under it? Hell I don't know. It's got to be easier than all that ECC circuitry and code.
    Seams the KISS principle is best here. (Keep It Simple Stupid, for those that don't know KISS)

    • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday January 06 2021, @08:43PM

      by DECbot (832) on Wednesday January 06 2021, @08:43PM (#1095785) Journal

      And here I thought KISS meant "what would Gene Simmons do?"

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base