Re: Wow! Is memory ever cheap!

[H. Peter Anvin]

Followup to:  <[e-mail]>
By author:    Larry McVoy <[e-mail]>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> On Sun, May 06, 2001 at 02:20:43PM +1200, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
> > 1.5GB without ECC? Seems like a disater waiting to happen? Is ECC
> > memory much more expensive?
> 
> Almost twice as expensive for 512MB dimms.
> 
> I used to be a die hard ECC fan but that changed since what we do here is
> BitKeeper and BitKeeper checksums everything.  It tells us right away when
> we have problems (to date it has found bad memory dimms, NFS corruption,
> and a SPARC/Linux cache aliasing bug).  So I've given up in ECC, we don't
> need it.
> 
> On the other hand, if your apps don't have built in integrity checks then
> ECC is pretty much a requirement.
> 

Isn't this pretty much saying "if you're willing to dedicate your
system to running nothing but Bitkeeper, you can run it really fast?"

	-hpa
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