FreeBSD 6.x CVSUP today crashes with zero load ...

[Wilko Bulte]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 11:54:53PM +0200, M.Hirsch wrote..
> Ok, sorry. Misunderstanding here.
> My point was, along what has been posted here in this thread:
> "An ECC error should raise a kernel panic immediately, not only a 
> message in the log files."
> Any hardware showing ECC errors should be replaced asap..

Yes, but keep in mind that ASAP often means "during a scheduled
maintenance window".  Which can be months away in some cases.

> Make them lazy admins do what they're getting paid for...
> 
> Correct, you can't (quickly) detect this without ECC hardware, of course.

Skip the 'quickly', you need ECC, full stop.  Otherwise you will not detect
it until it is way too late.  I can tell you from personal experience 
that customers hate nothing more than undetected data corruption.  ECC
RAM is only part of the fix of course.  ECC better be end to end, but it
hardly is..

> But I keep reading about "ECC" being the solution to broken RAM sticks...

Not really of course.  But there are OS-es that simply map pages with
known problems into a "do not use" list.  

> Since FreeBSD panics on creating simple malloc() vnodes, it should do so 
> on ECC errors first.
> Different mission, I guess ;)
> (And different problems with the recent fricking code...)
> 
> M.
--- end of quoted text ---

-- 
Wilko Bulte				wilko at FreeBSD.org