Re: FreeBSD Crashes with AMD

From: Don Lewis <truckman_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 00:18:14 -0800 (PST)
On  7 Jan, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> 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.

Back when Via allowed mere mortals to download their chipset manuals, I
looked at the KT266, KT333 and/or KT400 manuals and they seemed to claim
ECC support.  I never found any motherboards using these chipsets that
supported ECC RAM.  These days the tech support links on their chipset
pages lead to pages full of press releases.  I think Via only releases
chipset manuals to their "partners" these days.  About the only Athlon
XP motherboards that I've found that support ECC use the AMD-761
chipset. Unfortunately these don't support the newer Athlon XPs and they
seem to be disappearing from the market.  They ones that are left are
really inexpensive, though.  The Gigabyte GA7-DX+ I bought about a year
or so ago was very reasonably priced at the time and performs well.  My
suspicion is that the recent lack of ECC support may be due to AMD
wanting to move "serious" users over to their new 64 bit architecture.

>> 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 :)

Pointers?
Received on Tue Jan 06 2004 - 23:18:37 UTC

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