3 ms·
My lifetime experience says to suspect software did this (I've had careers in both hardware design, designing large memory subsystems, and in software developme
by dboreham 4y ago
My lifetime experience says to suspect software did this (I've had careers in both hardware design, designing large memory subsystems, and in software development). Yes it's one bit changed which makes the mind go to the ever present alpha particle, but code also flips single bits. If some library code inside a process generating this data wanted to update a bitmap structure but got the address wrong, you'd have the same outcome.
- H8crilA 4y agoFunny enough my experience says that it is hardware. Software bugs rarely manifest at such low frequencies (say 10^-15 or so) compared to hardware faults.
- jjoonathan 4y agoI just don't have the same level of trust in HW. My priors include a bunch of dead hard drives and a few bad sticks of RAM, all of which caused significant subtle damage before the big catastrophic failure that drew attention. None of these were ECC or RAID, but I've also seen enough foot-guns with ECC and RAID to place the probability of "solution degraded to consumer reliability" considerably north of zero.
- kevingadd 4y agoFlipping a single bit is a lot harder to do by accident in code than corrupting a byte or multiple bytes. You really are not doing bitwise operations on a regular basis in most types of software.