3 ms·

I remember djb exhorting people to buy ECC memory and supported motherboards back in 2001 (http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html)

I remember djb exhorting people to buy ECC memory and supported motherboards back in 2001 (http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html) for their standard workstations and me thinking he must be somewhat crazy since no one else seemed to be making a fuss about it. Perhaps he was right after all.

jrockway 17y ago
He is right. Have you ever had fsck detect errors on a filesystem that you haven't abused? Guess what, that's memory corruption -- saved to disk forever. I remember having a machine with especially flaky memory (memtest86 failed in about 30 seconds)... I detected it because dpkg's database was corrupted enough for it to cause errors in the application. I never even tried to save that filesystem...