FreeBSD Crashes with AMD

Bakul Shah bakul at BitBlocks.com
Tue Jan 6 22:14:46 PST 2004


> 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.

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?:-)


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