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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: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday January 06 2021, @07:12PM
All excellent points, thanks. Yes, I'm aware that for example, airline workers are at greater risk for radiation-induced health issues.
My concern, and what I think I'm gathering from Linus' rant, is the shift away from ECC. I think he's bothered by the lack of choice, and that choice being taken away for economic (cheapening) reasons, rather than solid technical / quality improvement reasons. As an engineer, the #1 thing I'm constantly told to put on my resume is how I cheapened something. The good news is that Intel is losing market share.
But I think another factor, at least has been in my professional life, is the people who make the purchasing decisions are generally not very technically-minded, and don't generally ask for technical advice from me or colleagues. They make "business" decisions about the hardware and software, OSes, development tools, etc., and foist it on us underlings. Specifically, when offered the option of ECC RAM, they simply say "oh, it costs more and gives indeterminate benefit? No thanks." So Intel starts cutting it out of their products. Hopefully it hurts them more and more.
But the point is, it's not just Intel, but (idiot) buyers who are driving ECC down.
All that said, as I posted elsewhere in this discussion, there are RAM chip manufacturers making chips with ECC built in. :) Not sure if ECC stats can be gleaned out though- maybe, could be...
https://www.intelligentmemory.com/ECC-DRAM/DDR3/ [intelligentmemory.com]