Re: Wow! Is memory ever cheap!

H. Peter Anvin
2001-05-07T18:48:11Z

Followup to: <20010505194536.D14127@work.bitmover.com>
By author: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> On Sun, May 06, 2001 at 02:20:43PM +1200, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
> > 1.5GB without ECC? Seems like a disater waiting to happen? Is ECC
> > memory much more expensive?
>
> Almost twice as expensive for 512MB dimms.
>
> I used to be a die hard ECC fan but that changed since what we do here is
> BitKeeper and BitKeeper checksums everything. It tells us right away when
> we have problems (to date it has found bad memory dimms, NFS corruption,
> and a SPARC/Linux cache aliasing bug). So I've given up in ECC, we don't
> need it.
>
> On the other hand, if your apps don't have built in integrity checks then
> ECC is pretty much a requirement.
>

Isn't this pretty much saying "if you're willing to dedicate your
system to running nothing but Bitkeeper, you can run it really fast?"

-hpa
--
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."