Re: FreeBSD Crashes with AMD

On Wednesday 07 January 2004 16:44, Bakul Shah wrote:
> > ECC RAM is nice, but it is considerably more expensive (especially when
> > you consider you need to buy 'server' motherboards to use it), and it can
> > get undetectable faults too :)
>
> This is not as bad as it used to be.  From compugeeks:
>     512MB DDR PC3200 ECC : $86.50
>     512MB DDR PC3200     : $65.50
> For 64 bit memory ECC is as cheap as parity.
>
> There are quite a few motherboards that 'support' ECC.  See
> for example,
>     http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-ecc/
> Though, not all are built well enough.

Hmm, well I am very suprised to see the Via VT400 in there - I can't see 
anything on the spec page for it that says it supports ECC, and the manual 
for the KT400 board doesn't say explicitly that ECC is supported.

> Standard ECC is also called SECDED: Single bit Error
> Correcting, Double bit Error Detecting.  All memory errors
> are pretty uncommon but of those one bit errors are the most
> common.
>
> FreeBSD *needs* to have ECC since it is already such a
> reliable OS -- you don't want your uptime spoiled by a memory
> failure, do you?:-)

It would be nice, but there are patches out there, grab them, clean them up 
and submit them :)

I just thought my idea was pretty cute, it would also be nice to say to people 
with mystery SIGSEGV's that the break into the loader type 'memtest' and see 
if they get errors :)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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