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I used to be pretty skeptical of ECC for consumer-grade hardware, mainly because I felt that I'd always prefer cheaper/more RAM over ECC RAM even if it meant th
by simias 6y ago
I used to be pretty skeptical of ECC for consumer-grade hardware, mainly because I felt that I'd always prefer cheaper/more RAM over ECC RAM even if it meant that I'd get a couple of crash every year due to rogue bitflips. For servers it's a different story, but for a desktop I'm fine dealing with some instability for better performance.
But these days with the RAM density being so high and bitflipping attacks being more than a theoretical threat it seems like there's really no good reason not to switch to ECC everywhere.
- fctorial 6y ago> cheaper/more RAM It's faster too.
- ekianjo 6y ago> no good reason not to switch to ECC everywhere. Not all CPUs support ECC however.
- loeg 6y ago(Intel)
- josefx 6y agoJust Intel fucking over security by making ECC a non feature on consumer grade hardware - wouldn't be surprised if it was just a single bit flipped in a feature mask.
- jjeaff 6y agoWell, with as common as a bunch of people in this thread seem to think bit flips are, it should just be a matter of time until that bit gets flipped on your cpu and activates the ecc feature.
- josefx 6y agoThat bit probably is either burned in or stored with the firmware in something more permanent than RAM. Modern RAM has the issue that it is optimized for capacity and speed to a point where state changes can leak into nearby bits.
- GlitchMr 6y agoFew issues with this statement: - That bit is not stored in RAM but rather somewhere within CPU which can have different bit flip frequency characteristics. - Even assuming this bit can be flipped, most computers wouldn't have ECC RAM inserted because well... the CPU doesn't support it. - And even assuming you have ECC RAM inserted, this bit flipping while your computer is running will likely lead to CPU hang considering the CPU didn't fill in error correction bits and will lead CPU to think that pretty much every single byte is corrupt. - And all in all, even if you did manage to turn on ECC bit, it would only work until the computer gets turned off.
- skunkworker 6y agoI've looked into this before, personally a Xeon E 2288g is probably the most "consumer" cpu intel offers that has ECC, 8 cores and QuickSync support. Trying to get ECC + Quicksync is a real pain.
- tokamak-teapot 6y agoAre there any Ryzen boards that support ECC and actually correct errors?
- dannyw 6y agoYes, almost all of them correct single-bit flips and detect but do not correct multiple hit flips.
- adrian_b 6y agoAs others have replied, all the ASRock boards where I have ever checked the specifications do support ECC and also some ASUS boards support ECC, e.g. all ASUS workstation boards. Because ECC means Error Correcting Code, by definition, any board that claims ECC support must actually correct the errors. The ECC codes used now, with 8 extra bits for each 64 data bits, correct any 1-bit error and detect any 2-bit errors. Very old computers (25 years old, or more) used parity instead of ECC and they just detected any 1-bit error (and any errors with an odd number of flipped bits), without being able to correct the errors.
- gruez 6y agoquick search: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?112750-List-Asus-Motherboards-that-Support-ECC-Mode-with-Ryzen-(ECC-Enabled) https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?112750-List-Asus-M...
- loeg 6y agoYes. E.g., all ASRock boards.