Tuesday, January 5th 2021

Linus Torvalds Calls Out Intel for ECC Memory Market Stagnation

Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel and version-control system called git, has posted another one of his famous rants, addressing his views about the lack of ECC memory in consumer devices. Mr. Torvalds has posted his views on the Linux kernel mailing list, where he usually comments about the development of the kernel. The ECC or Error Correcting Code memory is a special kind of DRAM that fixes the problems that occur inside the memory itself, where a bit can get corrupted and change the data stored, thus offering false results. ECC aims to fix those mistakes by implementing a system that fixes these small errors and avoids bigger problems. According to Mr. Torvalds, it is a technology that we need to be implemented everywhere, not just server space like Intel imagines.
Linus TorvaldsIntel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it's horribly bad market segmentation... Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt ECC. Seriously...The arguments against ECC were always complete and utter garbage... Now even the memory manufacturers are starting do do ECC internally because they finally owned up to the fact that they absolutely have to. And the memory manufacturers claim it's because of economics and lower power. And they are lying bastards - let me once again point to row-hammer about how those problems have existed for several generations already, but these f***** happily sold broken hardware to consumers and claimed it was an "attack", when it always was "we're cutting corners".
He continues more about it stating the following:
The "modern DRAM is so reliable that it doesn't need ECC" was always a bedtime story for children that had been dropped on their heads a bit too many times. Yes, I'm pissed off about it. You can find me complaining about this literally for decades now. I don't want to say "I was right". I want this fixed, and I want ECC. And AMD did it. Intel didn't.
Source: Phoronix
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54 Comments on Linus Torvalds Calls Out Intel for ECC Memory Market Stagnation

#51
trparky
If one of my systems were experiencing those kinds of memory errors (I don't run ECC memory) the odds of it affecting something important, like I don't know... the kernel, gets higher. If I was in a casino, I'd bet on it.

I'd say time to replace that RAM.
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#52
cst1992
Wouldn't mandating ECC drive the price of modules way up?
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#53
kapone32
ThrashZoneHi,
Yeah 3200c22 or even c16 is no prize, oc ability is not good.
AMD is getting better with memory oc but still same old story only using 2 sticks and 4 sticks still way more handicapped than Intel systems are.
Well I have 4 sticks on my X570 running at 3600 MHZ. Instead of handicapped you should say more responsive.
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#54
L'Eliminateur
trparkyIf one of my systems were experiencing those kinds of memory errors (I don't run ECC memory) the odds of it affecting something important, like I don't know... the kernel, gets higher. If I was in a casino, I'd bet on it.

I'd say time to replace that RAM.
Well.. yes, that's what you do, you buy/warranty the replacement and change it as soon as convenient, but meanwhile the errors will continue that's why you see soo many errors in the log.
I've had a customer that had a RAM error but was much more intermittent (probably a high address) and he ran like that for months
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