Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 21:03:24 +0100 (CET) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: ECC RAM useless with FreeBSD? Message-ID: <199912282003.VAA26830@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>
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Hi,
Recently a machine of mine started producing strange problems:
processes dying randomly, signal 11 most of the time, but some-
times also signals 10, 8 or 4. No kernel messages, no panic or
anything like that. Just processes randomly dying.
The box contained an ECC DIMM, the RAM timings were set quite
conservatively, the CPU was not overclocked. Everything was
appropriately cooled. I finally put the DIMM into a different
box, and the same sort of problems started appearing there.
Using a different DIMM fixed everything. So the first DIMM was
definitely broken.
I had thought that ECC RAM would enable recognition of memory
failures (in addition to automatically fixing simple one-bit
errors). I thought that the chipset would cause a CPU trap or
something like that if an unrecoverable RAM error occurs, so
the OS could take some appropriate action (at least produce
a log message). Am I wrong? It seems to just fail silently,
possibly even continuing to use wrong data in calculations,
just as if there was only non-ECC RAM.
Is this a know problem, a bug, or do I just expect too much?
Regards
Oliver
PS: These are the data of the two machines that I tried:
1 - Gigabyte 6BXD (intel 440BX chipset), FreeBSD 4.0-current of
July 1999 (yes, I know, it's a bit old).
2 - MSI MS-6167 (AMD "irongate" K7 chipset), FreeBSD 3.4-stable
of December 19th, 1999.
And yes, ECC was enabled in the BIOS setup of both boxes.
--
Oliver Fromme, Leibnizstr. 18/61, 38678 Clausthal, Germany
(Info: finger userinfo:olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de)
"In jedem Stück Kohle wartet ein Diamant auf seine Geburt"
(Terry Pratchett)
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