Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:43:17 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ECC status in FreeBSD Message-ID: <6.2.0.14.2.20041220153733.061c6830@localhost> In-Reply-To: <137C9E12-52D6-11D9-9340-003065ABFD92@mac.com> References: <6.2.0.14.2.20041220135549.05fdaa88@localhost> <137C9E12-52D6-11D9-9340-003065ABFD92@mac.com>
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At 03:25 PM 12/20/2004, Charles Swiger wrote: >However, your RAM isn't a hard drive, so the ad-sector remapping used >by hard drives is not fully applicable. Your machine is expected not >to have any part of memory fail reproducably, but if you do, it's time >to use the warranty and replace the entire chip. It's true that RAM is not a hard drive. However, if the problem is with certain memory cells rather than, say, the row or column drivers, the rest of the chip is usable. And if you did want to scuttle the entire module on which the chip resided, you'd probably want to disable that module in the meantime by telling the system not to use it. Certainly, you'd at least want to know which module was failing. There's nothing to tell you that right now. >ECC is a fine idea, but the motherboard chipset pretty much does >everything that is required (except for the reporting/syslogging), so >the kernel doesn't need to be specially involved for the system to >benefit from ECC protection. Alas, right now there's no way to KNOW that you need to deal with a failing RAM module until you start experiencing random and possibly destructive system panics or crashes. It'd be nice, at least, to see something in the logs or be able to collect statistics from the motherboard. --Brett
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