RAM Bitflips and ECC
Comments discuss bit flips in computer memory, primarily caused by cosmic rays, radiation, or hardware issues, and the importance and limitations of ECC memory for error detection and correction.
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They don't - random bit flips are expected over time. ECC memory is a thing because of this, but cosmic rays can strike the processors too.
How frequent are bit flips in RAM, causing errors undetected by non-ECC RAM?
This problem has no ultimate solution. I've seen all components flip bits, CPUs, networking cards, RAM, most often you just can't know for sure what did it. You can remedy it a bit (like with ECC), but ultimately there will always be corruption if you process hundreds of petabytes of data. Get used to it, your computer executes an instruction with a probability extremely close to 1, but not equal to 1.Deep in the archives of a well known tech company is a very well documented case o
Is ECC memory vulnerable to these kinds of bitflips?
Cosmic rays flip bits all the time:"one error per month per 256 MiB of ram was expected"http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what-...
Rowhammer, cosmic bitflip or hardware or just compiler bugs come to mind.
Are “cosmic rays” actually the only or primary way bits get flipped? Or is it just a stand-in for “all the ways non-ECC RAM can spontaneously have an erroneous bit or two”?
if cosmic ray bit flips were so rare then ecc ram wouldn't be a thing.
Not just faulty RAM. As far as I know, all modern RAM is going to have bitflips every once in a while (it even happens with ECC RAM)
Why? The error seems reasonable (radiation can and could have flipped bits, I've done it on sensitive hardware with a camera flash).