Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 25 Oct 1997 13:57:34 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Tom <tom@sdf.com>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Parity Ram
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.95q.971025134740.23973A-100000@misery.sdf.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971025115335.173A-100000@trojanhorse.ml.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

On Sat, 25 Oct 1997, Jamil J. Weatherbee wrote:

> Can someone fill me in on when you would want to use parity ram as opposed

  Why?  To discover memory problems before they corrupt data, and cause
random panics, core dumps, hangs, or file system corruption.  Personally,
I use ECC capable motherboards that can actually use parity to fix some
errors.

> to non-parity ram these days?  If there was some anomaly in memory how
> would freebsd handle it (is there a trap for parity error?)

  These days?  RAM can fail.  Nothing has changed in the last 10 years.
I've bought about a gig of RAM in the last couple of months, a good
percentage of SIMMs still arrive DOA.

  FreeBSD systems simple reboot upon parity errors.  This is pretty safe
thing to do.  Much better than what a non-parity system would at this
point (ex. corrupt your filesystems).  A smarter thing to do, might be to
simple stop the process owning the memory that failed, and flag the area
as unusable (NT does this).  Doesn't help much if kernel is in the bad
memory area though.

Tom





Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.3.95q.971025134740.23973A-100000>