Re: [yocto] Importance of ECC RAM on the build computer

[Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com>]

On 17/02/2023 10:41:37+0100, Alexander Kanavin wrote:
> On the other hand, I'm yet to hear an actual case of a broken build
> due to non-ECC. It's not impossible, but it seems exceedingly rare.
> You're far more likely to spend 100x as much time on logical errors or
> out-of-resources problems.

It actually happened in one of our build, were we had a bitflip in the
final binary which was then not working as expected.

We also had multiple cases of headers/source file corruption after the
tarball is extracted but usually those are either caught by the compiler
or don't matter at all.

> 
> Alex
> 
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2023 at 09:31, Yoann Congal <yoann.congal@smile.fr> wrote:
> >
> > Hi!
> >
> > Le ven. 17 f�vr. 2023 � 06:08, <davidskeck@fastmail.com> a �crit :
> >>
> >> Is there generally suggested advice regarding the importance of ECC on the build computer? I'm very new to Yocto so I'm not sure if there is a chance the final build image could experience some corruption due to flipped bits in RAM or if I'm totally overthinking this.
> >
> >
> > Last time I checked. The ECC vs non-ECC price difference was not worth the time you may spend in case of a RAM bitflip.
> > Here, we put ECC RAM in our build systems and I guess it's quite the industry standard.
> >
> >> It is also possible that Yocto does some kind of CRC checking of its own that makes this a non-issue. Any guidance would be appreciated. Thank you!
> >
> >
> > Yocto does source integrity checks (the stuff it downloads from the internet) but it can't do much more after that.
> >
> > I've yet to debug a RAM bitflip but I guess it may trigger any kind of weird behavior which may be hard to debug and time consuming.
> >
> > My advice is : keep your time and sanity, use ECC RAM.
> >
> > Regards,
> > --
> > Yoann Congal
> > Smile ECS - Expert technique
> >
> > 
> >

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-- 
Alexandre Belloni, co-owner and COO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com