4 ms·
Maybe this is common knowledge, but can ECC be done in software? I don’t necessarily see why not, despite the common-sense wisdom that it has to be done in hard
by patentatt 5y ago
Maybe this is common knowledge, but can ECC be done in software? I don’t necessarily see why not, despite the common-sense wisdom that it has to be done in hardware. With dram so cheap these days, why not just go full RAID 1 (where ECC is analogous to a RAID-5 implementation), and store each critical-path memory byte twice to detect bit flips or three times to fix? Let’s see row hammer attacks flip the same bit in two or three places at the same time. Sure it would impact performance, but maybe for something like encryption or banking it’s an acceptable trade off.
- carlmr 5y agoIn some safety related contexts you do have bitflip protection on the software level. E.g. you write every variable together with it's complement, to see if a random bit flip occurred. It's quite a lot of work, but if you have a long running embedded system, or a lot of the same, e.g. in cars, the incidence of bit flips increases. This is it course additional to other protection mechanisms.
- datameta 5y agoIn enterprise server memory controller firmware we use soft and hard row repair algorithms.