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Good for Linus. I'm honestly surprised that he doesn't try to get more involved in promoting more competition and openness of hardware vendors, but I do appreci

Good for Linus. I'm honestly surprised that he doesn't try to get more involved in promoting more competition and openness of hardware vendors, but I do appreciate his general neutrality and style in the community that he has fostered. However, he could potentially create more positive influence within innovation if he took a more stern stance and really pushed back, but I'm guessing he has to walk a pretty fine line to politically operate at the level he does, or he would risk corporate backlash that has near infinite money to set the narrative. I do wish though that he would take more of the Stallman approach, and advocate for more open-source activism via tech, especially when it comes to politics and governance. There is so much potential to really improve the environment, social justice, and create a society that prioritizes innovation over greed, but unfortunately it seems like it would take someone like Linus to really push the agenda in the position that he is currently in, rather than wait to see what happens after he is gone, because there will be a lot of disingenuous people that will try to take his place.

dfeojm-zlib 7y ago
On the post, if Linus is referring to low-end Xeon and workstation non-Xeon lacking ECC, I think it's completely idiotic. Nearly all infrastructure should be baking in ECC as standard rather than some "option" to not have silent, unknowable, probabilistic corruption that is realistically realizable on a near-daily basis given the orders of magnitude of network, storage and computational volumes of today (and the future) by ever lower tiers of end-users and common examples of network infrastructure. DEFCON 19: Bit-squatting: DNS Hijacking Without Exploitation (w speaker) https://youtu.be/aT7mnSstKGs https://youtu.be/aT7mnSstKGs
- drewg123 7y ago
  The sad thing is that I have seen signs of AMD starting to do the same. When I was shopping for a motherboard lately, I've begun seen motherboard manuals that state "ECC is only supported with PRO CPUs." See http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/Manual/X570%20Phantom%20Gaming-ITXTB3.pdf http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/Manual/X570%20Phantom%20...
  - agapon 7y ago
    I think taht Picasso is actually an APU (CPU+graphics) and before Ryzen/Zen they never supported ECC. So, I think that ECC is for PRO APUs is an improvement.
    - drewg123 7y ago
      I guess it depends on what "supported" means in the context of the mobo. I'm always afraid its going to mean that I cannot enable scrubbing, etc, if the cpu is not "supported"
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      > before Ryzen/Zen they never supported ECC Incorrect; there were a bunch of AM3(+) boards which advertised ECC support back in the day. The IMC of AMD's desktop processors always supported ECC if I'm not mistaken.
      - agapon 7y ago
        AM3 is not for APUs, though. FM2 is.
  - wokkel 7y ago
    As far as i know this is only true for APUs. Cpus without a gpu don't have this limitation. Also most mobo manufacturers don't seem to emphasise any ECC features as there are no RGB lights on any of the available DIMMs I assume.
    - gameswithgo 7y ago
      you can retrofit the rgb don’t worry!
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    Key word “supported”. AMD's consumer chips have ECC enabled but it is not validated.
- marmaduke 7y ago
  > low-end Xeon and workstation non-Xeon lacking ECC To be fair the single socket, low core count Xeons are not that pricey unless you try to match clock speed with the consumer chips... But, priorities, right?
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    Intel's blocking of ECC features is entirely arbitrary and artificial, the dies themselves already support it, they just disable it for consumer chips.
    - marmaduke 7y ago
      Ah I see, that's a different thing entirely
- willis936 7y ago
  I found the studies that this video (17:15) uses to establis a real world DRAM BER. https://tezzaron.com/media/soft_errors_1_1_secure.pdf https://tezzaron.com/media/soft_errors_1_1_secure.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf You’ll note that the papers were published in 2004 and 2009, respectively. Here is a paper from 2015 that paints a more accurate picture of hardware used today. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf Apparently these studies have strange ways to present data and do not give straight “BER per bit per second”, which I would think is the most useful metric. Without spending all day learning the jargon of this specific field, I think I can conclude, at a glance, that DDR4 has a lower BER than DDR3. The numbers matter, and I don’t know how serious of an issue it is currently. Without that knowledge its impossible to speak on the efficacy of more proliferated ECC in DRAM.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  > On the post, if Linus is referring to low-end Xeon and workstation non-Xeon lacking ECC, I think it's completely idiotic. I have said it before, I'll say it again, it is completely moronic that literally all storage and every bus in your computer uses FEC or at least uses checksums, except main memory and the memory bus.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    OK, devil's advocate here. Intel wants to segment it to make money. Perfecty rational, right? Also consumers want it that way as ECC needs extra bits and run a few percent slower. If gamers are willing to overclock their CPUs then they probably don't much care for slower memory. And $cost. I agree with you, but others have different priorities. (not an intel shill BTW)
    - dooglius 7y ago
      > If gamers are willing to overclock their CPUs then they probably don't much care for slower memory. And $cost. Then they can continue to buy and use non-ECC memory
      - tempguy9999 7y ago
        That was my point.
        dooglius 7y ago
        Intel supporting ECC RAM would not preclude them from doing so
- wmf 7y ago
  Coincidentally, a Xeon NUC with ECC just leaked; maybe Intel's strategy is changing. http://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/08/the-very-first-xeon-nuc.html http://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/08/the-very-first-xeon-nuc.h...

dfeojm-zlib 7y ago

On the post, if Linus is referring to low-end Xeon and workstation non-Xeon lacking ECC, I think it's completely idiotic. Nearly all infrastructure should be baking in ECC as standard rather than some "option" to not have silent, unknowable, probabilistic corruption that is realistically realizable on a near-daily basis given the orders of magnitude of network, storage and computational volumes of today (and the future) by ever lower tiers of end-users and common examples of network infrastructure. DEFCON 19: Bit-squatting: DNS Hijacking Without Exploitation (w speaker) https://youtu.be/aT7mnSstKGs https://youtu.be/aT7mnSstKGs

drewg123 7y ago
The sad thing is that I have seen signs of AMD starting to do the same. When I was shopping for a motherboard lately, I've begun seen motherboard manuals that state "ECC is only supported with PRO CPUs." See http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/Manual/X570%20Phantom%20Gaming-ITXTB3.pdf http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/Manual/X570%20Phantom%20...
- agapon 7y ago
  I think taht Picasso is actually an APU (CPU+graphics) and before Ryzen/Zen they never supported ECC. So, I think that ECC is for PRO APUs is an improvement.
  - drewg123 7y ago
    I guess it depends on what "supported" means in the context of the mobo. I'm always afraid its going to mean that I cannot enable scrubbing, etc, if the cpu is not "supported"
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    > before Ryzen/Zen they never supported ECC Incorrect; there were a bunch of AM3(+) boards which advertised ECC support back in the day. The IMC of AMD's desktop processors always supported ECC if I'm not mistaken.
    - agapon 7y ago
      AM3 is not for APUs, though. FM2 is.
- wokkel 7y ago
  As far as i know this is only true for APUs. Cpus without a gpu don't have this limitation. Also most mobo manufacturers don't seem to emphasise any ECC features as there are no RGB lights on any of the available DIMMs I assume.
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    you can retrofit the rgb don’t worry!
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Key word “supported”. AMD's consumer chips have ECC enabled but it is not validated.
marmaduke 7y ago
> low-end Xeon and workstation non-Xeon lacking ECC To be fair the single socket, low core count Xeons are not that pricey unless you try to match clock speed with the consumer chips... But, priorities, right?
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Intel's blocking of ECC features is entirely arbitrary and artificial, the dies themselves already support it, they just disable it for consumer chips.
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    Ah I see, that's a different thing entirely
willis936 7y ago
I found the studies that this video (17:15) uses to establis a real world DRAM BER. https://tezzaron.com/media/soft_errors_1_1_secure.pdf https://tezzaron.com/media/soft_errors_1_1_secure.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf You’ll note that the papers were published in 2004 and 2009, respectively. Here is a paper from 2015 that paints a more accurate picture of hardware used today. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf Apparently these studies have strange ways to present data and do not give straight “BER per bit per second”, which I would think is the most useful metric. Without spending all day learning the jargon of this specific field, I think I can conclude, at a glance, that DDR4 has a lower BER than DDR3. The numbers matter, and I don’t know how serious of an issue it is currently. Without that knowledge its impossible to speak on the efficacy of more proliferated ECC in DRAM.
blattimwind 7y ago
> On the post, if Linus is referring to low-end Xeon and workstation non-Xeon lacking ECC, I think it's completely idiotic. I have said it before, I'll say it again, it is completely moronic that literally all storage and every bus in your computer uses FEC or at least uses checksums, except main memory and the memory bus.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  OK, devil's advocate here. Intel wants to segment it to make money. Perfecty rational, right? Also consumers want it that way as ECC needs extra bits and run a few percent slower. If gamers are willing to overclock their CPUs then they probably don't much care for slower memory. And $cost. I agree with you, but others have different priorities. (not an intel shill BTW)
  - dooglius 7y ago
    > If gamers are willing to overclock their CPUs then they probably don't much care for slower memory. And $cost. Then they can continue to buy and use non-ECC memory
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      That was my point.
      - dooglius 7y ago
        Intel supporting ECC RAM would not preclude them from doing so
wmf 7y ago
Coincidentally, a Xeon NUC with ECC just leaked; maybe Intel's strategy is changing. http://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/08/the-very-first-xeon-nuc.html http://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/08/the-very-first-xeon-nuc.h...