Take any two: motherboard performance, compatibility, value

[Josip Loncaric]

Bob Drzyzgula wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jun 28, 2000 at 10:28:58PM +0200, Jakob Østergaard wrote:
> >
> > Are you absolutely certain that ECC RAM on PC hardware actually *corrects*
> > bit errors ?

[ Intel says yes ]

> I would expect, for example, that the chipset
> would raise some sort of alert if a single-bit ECC error
> was detected and corrected; certainly the OS would want
> to log such an event.

After BIOS activates ECC, the 440BX chipset logs all corrected single
bit errors (and all detected multiple bit errors); but Linux kernel does
*not* automatically monitor the relevant 440BX register.  You need to
donload, compile and insert the 'ecc' module to get ECC logging.  This
module (which currently works *only* on uniprocessor machines) is
available from 

http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-ecc/

This module produces the following kind of output:

Jun  8 18:47:11 n009 kernel: ECC: monitor version 0.9 (Oct 15 1999)  
Jun 27 19:04:30 n009 kernel: ECC: SBE detected in DRAM row 3  
Jun 27 19:04:30 n009 kernel: ECC: SBE at memory address 8000  


Sincerely,
Josip

-- 
Dr. Josip Loncaric, Senior Staff Scientist        mailto:josip at icase.edu
ICASE, Mail Stop 132C           PGP key at http://www.icase.edu./~josip/
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