3 ms·
What are you proposing? ECC (classic SECDED for instance) is a form of FEC. What is it you want?
by dbcurtis 9y ago
What are you proposing? ECC (classic SECDED for instance) is a form of FEC. What is it you want?
- teddyh 9y agoI must admit to not being an expert in these matters, and I therefore defer to this comment by JoshTriplett, where he talks about ECC as being inferior to FEC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11604918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11604918
- dbcurtis 9y agoOK, so I read that, too. I'm still fuzzy on what is being asked for. Extrapolating based on my 20 years of experience as a CPU logic designer, and graduate work in error correcting codes, I'm guessing that what the author seems to want is to have uncorrectable memory read errors passed to user space as an exception that the application can handle as it sees fit. (I wouldn't call that FEC, but, /shrug ...) The OS gets the exception. There are always (usually priviledged) instructions to read and set the memory check bits. It would be darn hard to write memory diagnostics without them, or sometimes even to boot a machine that powers up with random bits in the memory. If I understand what the author wants, (and I have my doubts that the author understands what they want), then they are asking for an OS feature, not a CPU feature, and simply want the exception to bubble up to user space.