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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @01:48PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @01:48PM (#1095605)

    But if you're that worried, go with Xeon + ECC.

    I think I'll go with AMD + ECC, thank you very much. No need to pay premium for chips that don't have something disabled on purpose.

  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday January 06 2021, @03:42PM

    by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday January 06 2021, @03:42PM (#1095644)

    I think I'll go with AMD + ECC, thank you very much. No need to pay premium for chips that don't have something disabled on purpose.

    I think there's a misunderstanding. Yes, I'd go with AMD no question. I'm NO Intel shill, at all. I was thinking more along the lines of very very cheaply available USED business-class servers and workstations. Most corporations depreciate otherwise great hardware rather quickly, and it's on the used market- ebay, craigslist, etc.

    If you can afford new, by all means have at it. AMD would be my choice if I could afford new.

    I don't think Intel "disabled" ECC "on purpose". In the past, there were large chips (often called "chipset" because it used to be many chips), that interconnect the CPU, RAM, PCI and other internal busses, and the various IO. The chipset handled ECC logic functionality. More and more Intel and AMD have been pulling the chipset functions into the CPU, and Intel simply didn't include the ECC stuff. I don't think it was disabled, but rather left out. And I'm not disagreeing with anyone- it should be included. It frustrates me to no end that useful functionality is designed out of things to save costs (because much of the market doesn't care?) Sadly companies don't do things because it's the right thing to do. All of this seems obvious, to me, but in these online conversations it's like people ignore basic knowledge of capitalism, social values, etc. Point is, I didn't think I had to write all of those disclaimers when it seems like common knowledge.

    Anyway, all that said, ECC logic could still be done, between the CPU and RAM, by any motherboard / system designer that wishes to.

    Also, somewhere I read that because ECC is being supported less and less, that RAM manufacturers are including it it the RAM chips themselves. You may not be able to get at the workings to get stats, but I don't know. It may be available on the i2c bus.