At 19:17 13.05.2008, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
So another question is, how can you reliably test any of this stuff? It isn't like you can reliably induce single bit errors and see if the hardware catches them. (A special memory module that let you test would be a wonderful thing, but I've never even heard of such a thing.)
Well, you can trust the HW vs, the firmware. Further, for some chipsets it is possible to simply stop the memory refresh for some time (~1 minute) while the system is idle. After this, you enable it again, and you should see single and/or double bit errors. This enabling/disabling through setpci or other. If you do not see errors after this, you can try to explain why...
Once I wrote tool which examined all settings of a particular chipset. That raised numerous questions to the vendor.
Hakon
I'm doing the planning for a new cluster and the whole thing is remarkably bothersome. You can't easily figure out what motherboards will even pretend to do ECC that easily, you can't easily check once you have a sample motherboard in hand. It isn't even easy to get ECC memory for more modern standards. I'm starting to wonder if doing all calculations twice, once on each of two machines, isn't easier, but it seems utterly wrong to do that... Perry
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