A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5
Exactly, one of the ‘nerd edge cases’ (as the now removed comment mentioned) is that I use ZFS on my NAS.
There’s lots of checksumming and encryption. Errors in that process are not acceptable and could potentially cause data loss. Since the one of the points of using ZFS is the enhanced data integrity, not using ECC means losing out on that guarantee.
Nobody fucking cares my man. Not important. Nobody in the regular world has ever been effected by not having ECC. You’re inventing edge cases that most cares about. Linus suffers from not understanding normal people.
You can’s speak about not having frequent corruption of files when you are not using tools detecting it. I can guarantee you have plenty of already corrupt stuff on your hard drives. RAM bit flips do contribute to that.
You have bugs (leading to broken documents, something failing, freezes, crashes) in applications you use and part of them is not due to developer’s error, but due to uncorrected memory errors.
If you’d try using a filesystem like ZFS with checksumming and regular rescans, you’d see detected errors very often. Probably not corrected, because you’d not use mirroring to save space, dummy.
And if you were using ECC, you’d see messages about corrected memory errors in dmesg often enough.
At what% does this effect the average consumer. And additionally in a critical easy. Can you cite, literally one case, where the presence of ECC would have been critical beyond an occasional annoyance. 1.
The exact numbers for when it messes something up, but keeps running, are unknown and highly ubpredictable.
According to above post, about 10% of firefox crashes (more numbers found in the post) are caused by this stuff. It’s not unreasonable to say those crashes could’ve had the bitflip happen on content instead, changing maybe a character on the page or something.
Note that it’s not 10% of users, as that’s reslly hard to figure out. Someone with bad RAM will likely crash more often.
Bit rot is real, I’ve seen it first hand in plenty of cases. While I tend to blame the storage device, for infrequently accessed files that have been copied multiple times from different drives, I can’t rule out RAM or some other source of the corruption.
Improved overall system stability and data accuracy? With error correction, you can also push performance farther, since you can tolerate a certain amount of errors, instead of needing to aim for 0% error rate.
Removed by mod
Simple stuff like a calculator can be just as broken by a bitflip as more complex things. You wouldn’t want your calculator to say 1 + 1 = 2049.
If you want to rely on your computer, ECC RAM is required.
Exactly, one of the ‘nerd edge cases’ (as the now removed comment mentioned) is that I use ZFS on my NAS.
There’s lots of checksumming and encryption. Errors in that process are not acceptable and could potentially cause data loss. Since the one of the points of using ZFS is the enhanced data integrity, not using ECC means losing out on that guarantee.
Nobody fucking cares my man. Not important. Nobody in the regular world has ever been effected by not having ECC. You’re inventing edge cases that most cares about. Linus suffers from not understanding normal people.
You can’s speak about not having frequent corruption of files when you are not using tools detecting it. I can guarantee you have plenty of already corrupt stuff on your hard drives. RAM bit flips do contribute to that.
You have bugs (leading to broken documents, something failing, freezes, crashes) in applications you use and part of them is not due to developer’s error, but due to uncorrected memory errors.
If you’d try using a filesystem like ZFS with checksumming and regular rescans, you’d see detected errors very often. Probably not corrected, because you’d not use mirroring to save space, dummy.
And if you were using ECC, you’d see messages about corrected memory errors in dmesg often enough.
Based on the article, it looks like at least 10% of crashes are caused by not having ECC.
Well, you are demonstrating that you’re an expert people person so I’ll just have to take your word.
At what% does this effect the average consumer. And additionally in a critical easy. Can you cite, literally one case, where the presence of ECC would have been critical beyond an occasional annoyance. 1.
The exact numbers for when it messes something up, but keeps running, are unknown and highly ubpredictable.
According to above post, about 10% of firefox crashes (more numbers found in the post) are caused by this stuff. It’s not unreasonable to say those crashes could’ve had the bitflip happen on content instead, changing maybe a character on the page or something.
Note that it’s not 10% of users, as that’s reslly hard to figure out. Someone with bad RAM will likely crash more often.
Bit rot is real, I’ve seen it first hand in plenty of cases. While I tend to blame the storage device, for infrequently accessed files that have been copied multiple times from different drives, I can’t rule out RAM or some other source of the corruption.
Improved overall system stability and data accuracy? With error correction, you can also push performance farther, since you can tolerate a certain amount of errors, instead of needing to aim for 0% error rate.