We’ve all had our PCs crashed at some point in our lives and the father of Linux on several occasions, however, what drove Linus Torvalds crazy was that one component of the PC still lacks a feature that the ‘we find in the servers, neither more nor less than the correction of the errors in the RAM. What are your arguments for asking for such a change? Is the father of the Penguin operating system right to demand such a hardware change?
Imagine you are programmers and have been compiling a large section of code for over hours only to find that suddenly some data in the system RAM has been slightly modified, sending the resulting binary to fret. Well, that’s what happened to the father of Linux when it came to releasing an improved kernel for its operating system.
Why did the PC crash on the father of Linux?
We must start from the fact that those who end up deciding the specifications of the different types of RAM memory is the JEDEC, which publishes a detailed document that both parties must strictly follow. On the one hand, the manufacturers of the memory modules or the chips themselves, depending on the case, and on the other hand, the manufacturers and designers of processors. However, for some time now there seems to have been a specification that separates server RAM from that used in home systems. The so-called ECC or Error Correction Code.
Well, during the development of the Linux kernel, the father of the free operating system did not hesitate to criticize this situation after seeing problems with his computer with an AMD processor, but this is not the company led by Lisa Su, who blamed , but its rival, Intel and with the following words:
The only reason Intel says “ECC (memory) is only for servers and embedded systems” is because Intel’s marketing people have convinced everyone that they can sell inferior chips at a price. high if they have ECC functionality. . Look at the type of hcips that Intel sells with ECC, the ones you see next to Xeon and systems with Intel Atom, they’re usually no better.
Don’t fall for this shit ECC is not for servers, it’s for everyone And paying a little more for RAM shouldn’t mean you’re limited elsewhere.
The memories that our PCs use are of the dynamic type, which is why they tend to lose information from time to time and this is where the error correction mechanisms act in order to preserve the information. Unfortunately, in the RAM of home PCs, these mechanisms are not integrated.
Does Torvalds’ criticism of Intel make sense?
Since the part that communicates the RAM with the processor is the integrated memory controller and it is located in the circuitry of the CPU, the answer is a resounding yes. It was Intel that made sure that in the domestic market we did not have memories with ECC support and this led to the fact that most manufacturers do not include it in the RAM memories sold.
The complaint of the veteran Finnish programmer is right, it is enough to modify a memory address to send a program to the fret and even to crash a PC. This in servers that have to run 24/7 is fatal and that’s why error-correcting memory is used, so Torvalds criticizes Intel for not having memory controllers with support ECC on your Intel Core laptops and desktops. And it is that if Intel did it immediately, AMD would follow the path and with it also the manufacturers of DIMM and SO-DIMM modules, as well as those of motherboards.
