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

Accepted submission by takyon at 2021-01-05 17:08:08 from the bit-flip-out dept.
Hardware

Linus Torvalds On The Importance Of ECC RAM, Calls Out Intel's "Bad Policies" Over ECC [phoronix.com]

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 do 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 [realworldtech.com].

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


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