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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.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2021, @03:46PM
Yep, ACPI was a particular mess because MS refused to enforce Intel's rules about how the DSDT was written. You'd have systems shipping with DSDT so badly written that they would not compile at all on the reference compiler that companies were supposed to be using, but MS would include special code to tolerate it rather than just allowing the system to have working ACPI support. I remember having to dump and recompile it myself because the manufacturer was too lazy to properly code it. The thing is that in that case, it wouldn't have even cost them any development time as the core logic was correct, there were just a few minor things they chose not to do correctly. No programming knowledge necessary.
Going back to the bad old Wintel days, MS has used manufacturer laziness to make it hard for any other OS to compete with them. So, this isn't exactly new news or particularly shocking for those paying attention. Not only were those Wintel modems less functional, but you had to pay a premium for having some of the working offloaded onto the CPU.