Many of AMD's CPU/APU parts support ECC memory. Not just the top of the line parts, but also many of the less expensive, less power hungry parts. However, many (most?) of the boards for these chips do not support ECC, or at least do not admit to it. They specify "non-ECC memory".
Obviously there have to be connections between the memory controller and the memory for the extra bits. Aside from a little extra time for the board designer to add a few traces to the wire list, this would not raise the cost of the board. Despite this I have read that some boards lack the necessary traces. Does the firmware have to do anything to support ECC? Program a few registers in the memory controller perhaps? A few boards have FLOSS firmware available, so this code could be added, but most boards do not have firmware sources available. Assuming that a board does have the necessary connections but the firmware does not have ECC support, is there some reason that ECC support could not be added to the OS instead of the firmware? I grepped through FreeBSD 8.2 and 10.1 sources but couldn't find anything that looked relevant. Also did not find any code that reported ECC errors, other than one device. Perhaps I missed it? I've been running machines with ECC for 15-20 years and have never seen a report of an ECC error from either NetBSD or FreeBSD. I have seen reports of ECC errors from Digital Unix. And remember getting panics due to parity errors on machines before ECC. So I'm thinking that the BSDs must ignore hardware reports of single bit ECC errors. :-( _______________________________________________ freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hardware-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
