Video memory as swap under FreeBSD

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Alexander Motin <mav at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> writes:
> > Arne Schwabe <schwabe at uni-paderborn.de> writes:
> > > Video RAM may also not be as stable as your main RAM.  I mean
> > > nobody [cares] if a bit flips in video ram.
> > That may have been true fifteen years ago, but not today.
> Have the anybody ever seen ECC video RAM? Video RAM usually works on
> higher frequencies then main RAM and IMHO it must affect stability.
> For video RAM some percent of errors is really less important, I have
> seen it myself with my previous video card until it died completely.

A modern video adapter is basically a processor with a specialized
instruction set and multiple parallel pipelines.  Video memory is not
just a frame buffer, it contains code and structured data (textures,
polygon lists etc.)  If you're lucky, a single-bit error might just
change the color of a pixel, but it might also crash the GPU.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no