Re: [RFC 4/7] mm: add page consistency checker implementation

Sasha Levin
2026-04-27T23:24:48Z

On Mon, Apr 27, 2026 at 09:37:02PM +0200, David Hildenbrand (Arm) wrote:
>
>>>
>>> Thanks, but I fundamentally don't understand how RAS capabilities interact here?
>>> We have mm/memory-failure.c for a reason :)
>>
>> We do, but self driving safety requires way more than the current hardware can
>> provide.
>>
>> I'll point you to https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775054.2694348 , which
>> researched these issues in a datacenter environment (so no sun exposure,
>> temperature controlled, designed to avoid electromagnetic interference).
>>
>> "We call a fault that generates an error larger than 2 bits in an ECC word an
>> undetectable-by-SECDED fault. A fault is undetectable-by-SECDED if it affects
>> more than two bits in any ECC word, and the data written to that location does
>> not match the value produced by the fault."
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> "A Cielo node has 288 DRAM devices, so this translates to 6048, 518, and 57.6
>> FIT per node for vendors A, B, and C, respectively. This translates to one
>> undetected error every 0.8 days, every 9.5 days, and every 85 days on a machine
>> the size of Cielo."
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> "Our main conclusion from this data is that SEC-DED ECC is poorly suited to
>> modern DRAM subsystems. The rate of undetected errors is too high to justify
>> its use in very large scale systems comprised of thousands of nodes where
>> fidelity of results is critical."
>
>Yes, I read before that ECC is insufficient to detect certain bitflips.
>
>But I don't understand how this patch set here is going to move the needle in
>any reasonable way?
>
>You have your magical self-driving car algorithm.
>
>Bitflips can corrupt your algorithm, your data, the kernel image, your user page
>tables, your kernel page tables. Even a pointer to a bitmap :)
>
>... and we worry about the state of allocated vs. free pages.

Do we agree that this is one piece of a (much) larger puzzle that we would need
to tackle?

>Please enlighten me!

Definitely! This is a pretty hefty body of work, so outside of trying to get
the code out there we're also working on documentation, talks, webinars, etc in
the context of ELISA (https://elisa.tech/).

The concept itself was approved by an independant assessor as compliant with
the relevant safety standard, so the story is there, we're just working on
getting it out.

--
Thanks,
Sasha