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

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

takyon writes:

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'
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @01:50PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @01:50PM (#1095606)

    On Linux they call this User Error or WONTFIX.

    On Linux, they call it "unreproducible". More seriously, with free software, the user can actually fix the damn problem too.

  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday January 06 2021, @03:54PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday January 06 2021, @03:54PM (#1095655) Journal

    The user can fix a flipped bit on Linux? Don't think so.

    When you get weird errors , and you swap the ram, and it goes away, problem solved.

    There have even been cases where one stick will be more susceptible to EM interference from the power supply, and swapping slots so the vulnerable stick is now furthest from the power supplyfixes the problem.

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