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Do they support ECC memory?
by std_throwaway 10y ago
Do they support ECC memory?
- 65827 10y agoHopefully not, biggest scam out there.
- throwawaydbfif 10y agoThe biggest scam is actually the other way around. Intel pulled ECC support from desktop processors a few years ago to force datacentres to buy their Xeons instead. It's nearly impossible to find a desktop CPU that supports ECC ram now even though 5 years ago it was commonplace. Trying to run a NAS with some sensitive data is now impossible unless you buy their server chips
- dogma1138 10y agoIf you going the workstation route then 2011 Xeon CPU's do support ECC and are cheaper than Desktop HEDT parts. Getting an Intel Xeon E3 for socket 1151 isn't particularly hard or expensive either.
- throwawaydbfif 10y agoYeah have fun buying the motherboard that supports it. The whole thing reeks of bullshit
- mcbain 10y ago> It's nearly impossible to find a desktop CPU that supports ECC ram now That's not correct. All 6th Gen Core i3 have ECC support, and the 7th Gen Core i3 that have 'E' in the product name support ECC: http://ark.intel.com/products/97130/Intel-Core-i3-7101E-Processor-3M-Cache-3_90-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/97130/Intel-Core-i3-7101E-Proc...
- c2h5oh 10y agoTo be fair i3 being the lower end offering with just 2 cores isn't really competing against any of the server products Intel offers. Quad (and more) core i5 and i7 that do have near-equivalent Xeon parts do have ECC disabled.
- throwawaydbfif 10y agoSorry, maybe not a NAS but my point stands. Almost any chip that has a server equivalent either has ECC disabled in the chip or the motherboard chipset. This was never the case until some years ago, and the only example I've ever found of Intel removing a feature from their desktop chips exclusively. I don't see any other reason for this except to force people to buy Xeons for their servers
- sliken 10y agoXeon E3's with ECC are rather similar, and even sometimes cheaper than the i5/i7 equiv. They are the same die after all.
- free652 10y agoI personally tested a number of low end haswell pentiums and i3s and they support ECC. I have a 4310T paired with a C222 server board for my ZFS NAS.
- baq 10y agoLived under a rock for the last year? Rowhammer is a thing now.
- dogma1138 10y agoECC doesn't completely mitigate against rowhammer style attacks, it makes it more difficult in some cases and prevents single bit flipping attacks but multiple bit flipping attacks against a single ECC domain are still possible. That said if you want hardware level attacks then attacks against the cachelines of the CPU are considerably more dangerous and reliable and there is very little one can do to mitigate against those.
- msbarnett 10y agoECC won't save you from Rowhammer. See the ECC RAM section of http://www.thirdio.com/rowhammer.pdf http://www.thirdio.com/rowhammer.pdf On some systems, ECC is flat out broken or silently ignored. On many others ECC errors aren't reported to the OS in granular enough batches to do anything about them. Edit: relevant portions: > Before we begin to discuss our results, we must first discuss ECC protected systems and the fact that there are no standards on what constitutes ECC protection or ECC event reporting. At its base level, ECC protection simply means that a server can handle or correct single bit errors, although some systems advertise the ability to correct multiple bit errors. Generally, it is our belief that ECC events should be reported to the operating system so that savvy users can gauge the health of their infrastructure. > Unfortunately, server vendors routinely use a technique called ECC threshold or the 'leaky bucket' algorithm where they count ECC errors for a period of time and report them only if they reach certain levels of failure. From what we understand, this threshold is commonly above 100 per hour, but this remains a trade secret and varies based on the server vendor. So, to see ECC errors (MCE in Linux or WHEA in Windows), there generally needs to be 100 bit flips per hour or greater. This makes “seeing” Rowhammer on server error logs more difficult. > In addition, we have observed some server vendors will NEVER report ECC events back to the OS, although they might get logged into IPMI. Typically, users expect to see correctable ECC errors logged directly to the OS or that halt the system when they cannot be corrected. During our investigation into this phenomenon, we even encountered one server that neither reported ECC events to the OS nor halted when bit flips were not correctable. The end result was data corruption at the application level. This is something, in our opinion, that should never happen on an ECC protected server system. > ... > Using these advanced techniques, we were able to observe ECC events within the first 3 minutes of test time. Generally, this system would lockup or reboot within 30 minutes. Once again, this was on a Rowhammer mitigated system using both ECC and double refresh. So it follows that dual mitigations, on some systems, appear to be flawed and can be exploited as a denial of service.
- chatterbeak 10y agoReally? I won't use a computer without it for production work. You get one bit-flip/GB/year. With 128GB or more in most of our desktops, it's not worth the risk.
- std_throwaway 10y agoThank you for taking the time to not answer the question but raising another question instead. I have serious doubts that ECC indeed is the biggest scam out there. How does ECC compare to the fiat money ponzi scheme?
- laurentdc 10y agoWhy do you consider ECC the biggest scam out there? Btw, is there any updated paper/source with some stats on bit-flip odds in modern computers? Last I've read was this one [1] but it's been debated to death. [2] [3] [1] http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109401 [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ayleb/got_4gb_ram_no_ecc_then_you_have_95_probability/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ayleb/got_4gb_...
- mozumder 10y agoSpeaking as a hardware engineer, no one should ever buy non ECC-RAM. Smartphones and laptops should also come with ECC-RAM. It is that important for reliability.
- dogma1138 10y agoIf it is that important to reliability why isn't all software failing around us? It's important but it's not that important outside of specific applications/use cases.
- mozumder 10y ago> If it is that important to reliability why isn't all software failing around us? They do fail. Lots and lots of times. And it gets worse over time, as chips degrade due to hot-electron effects or electromigration.
- dogma1138 10y agoYou forgot random bits flipping due to cosmic radiation.
- rixed 10y agoSpeaking with data regarding failure rates and its actual impact would be even more appreciated.
- mozumder 10y agoYah that's not going to happen. Lot of that is Fab trade secret. You'll have to use your best guess or intuition on this.
- rixed 10y agoMy personal experience tells me that a bit flip is very unlikely to cause a system to fail before a bug or normal termination turns it down. My intuition tells me this is due to shorter and shorter individual program life span due to expansion of client/server architecture, higher frequency of bugs due to expansion of untyped/unstructured data, and the fact that most data manipulated by a program is not initialized/used anyway. Only in very big clusters have I ever heard of memory failure being noticable, but even there I've never seen memory corruption cited in a post mortem. Having to deal with bugs and other hardware defects forces one to work around lack of data integrity anyway.
- Qantourisc 10y agoI have been trying to find out, for a while now. I have not been able to obtain any information on this. If they don't have ECC, Ryzen will not be an option for me. The extra cost is marginal compared to finding out you have bad RAM (by crashing and corruption).
- mozumder 10y agoThere are huge server Zen CPUs expected a few months later. That should at least have ECC if these don't.