Will raspberry get ECC support?

Was reading this:

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with ever more RAM (now 8 GB) and raspberry used more and more for very serious things should that not be the next step?

grin

Reply to
Jan Panteltje
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A large-scale study of Google servers found that roughly 32 percent of all servers (and 8 percent of all DIMMs) in Google's fleet experience at least one memory error per year.

...i.e. about one error per server per three years. (Perhaps even lower frequency on consumer hardware since it generally has less RAM.) I don?t think consumers should expect to see their computers get noticably more reliable overall if ECC RAM does become ubiquitous, because that failure rate is totally swamped by software bugs.

I have once seen a inarguable memory error in the wild, affecting the cached copy of /bin/cat on a Linux box, about 20Y ago.

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Reply to
Richard Kettlewell

The Pi is a low cost computer. Given that ECC requires more memory (36 bits for every 32 of data), who is paying?

(noting that ECC is extremely uncommon in mobile devices, 36-bit wide LPDDR4 chips may be hard to find)

Theo

Reply to
Theo

From an article in The Register, if you're running on fairly recent Intel chips you won't have ECC memory unless you're on Xeons - none of their consumer-grade of laptop MPUs support ECC, and because they don't, the motherboards don't have the data lines needed to connect the extra bits.

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Reply to
Martin Gregorie

RAM is enormously more reliable than it was forty years ago and of course much more compact. Early digital video equipment was built with RAM ICs (1-16k*bits*) in sockets because of their poor reliability, which became poorer still because of the sockets. A machine built around a Data General Nova had three diagnostics available for its 32kB of RAM, which was made of 256 1kb ICs (on two 15" square PCBs). Video frame stores, needing half a megabyte, only became practical as reliability and density got much higher.

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Joe
Reply to
Joe

I wish. I think it's very doubtful Broadcom will do that. It's up to them to add that support in the SoC's memory controller first.

Still, the RPi might actually make a decent ARM based computer one of these years. I just saw a mini-ITX carrier board for the compute module

4 at
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but I'll pass. I'd like two SATA ports and one m.2. Odroid H2 but in a standard form factor and an ARM CPU in other words.

As for a PC with ECC RAM, my file server has it and it wasn't that expensive a system but then it's already quite old. I'm planning to upgrade my gaming and general desktop PC soon and for that ECC RAM seems very slow and somewhat expensive compared to non-ECC.

Oh and as for Intel's stupidity in this and other market segmentation ideals I fully agree with Torvalds. I don't think it's a particularly bold position either as the Ars article says, more like stating the obvious.

Reply to
Anssi Saari

My current laptop comes in an i9-10885H and a Xeon W-10885M version (among other options). They're identical but for the ECC support - they're the same die, but the i9 has ECC disabled. This is just Intel's market segmentation. There's no reason why they couldn't enable ECC across many of their parts if they wanted to - which is what AMD has done.

Theo

Reply to
Theo

Something everyone here seems to be missing is that ECC provides some degree of protection from deliberate attacks meant to flip bits or read arbitrary portions of memory otherwise off-limits. The best known of these is Rowhammer. Now, I grant that a new Rowhammer attack has been discovered that works even on ECC memory. It does show, however, that better ECC memory design might entirely fix this problem. That was a big part of Linus's concerns.

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David Griffith 
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Reply to
David Griffith

On a sunny day (Fri, 8 Jan 2021 22:50:44 -0000 (UTC)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@661.org (David Griffith) wrote in :

I was more thinking along the lines where people board SpaceX flights to Mars and bring the lightest possible personal computers with them: raspberries High radiation levels... Or astronauts in earth orbit, or high altitude flights... Moonbase

Sitting on Mars without a raspberry to play with ...imagine... As to radiation, I moved house a month or so ago, been logging radiation for years

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note the sudden increase, those are counts per minute from
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Why? Maybe the neighbors are building a bomb? the extra radiation dropped a bit after I hovered the place a couple of times but not much.

Of course ECC would be nice to have once the rad levels go way up when trump presses the red button in despair. Or maybe he will just ask for political asylum in Saudi Arabia...

zorry for drifting on the topic

Yes, rowhammer, not much is safe, long ago when hacking was less known I hacked some sat pay-TV, did not take long. Nothing is safe IMO. You have to be just willing, motivated, dedicated, removed it from my site when some politica started jumping on a chair and screamed 'Hackers!!' like that woman in the cartoon does when she sees a mouse, calls the cat, well you know who always wins no not the cat.

This is very recent and nice:

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I did read the paper last night and those guys have the dedication and persistence, nice work!

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

Is there a radon barrier under your house ?

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Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
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Reply to
Ahem A Rivet's Shot

If so its normal for a granite style area. get worried when it isn't a click every 5 seconds, but a high pitched scream.....

Normal background is around 5mS/Yr Granite areas up to 20mS/yr Some places up to 200mS/yr.

The amount before cancer risks measurably increase is massively more.

The amount before the Japanese government declares an emergency is massively less.

The amount before Jane Fonda declares an emergency is zero.

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"I am inclined to tell the truth and dislike people who lie consistently. 
This makes me unfit for the company of people of a Left persuasion, and  
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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Did your new neighbours give you some bananas as a moving-in gift?

Reply to
Andy Burns

On a sunny day (Sat, 9 Jan 2021 08:57:26 +0000) it happened Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote in :

Yes I have thought about radon, no real basement here, build quite a while ago, could be. There is some granite countertop in the kitchen on the other side of the wall of where the radiation counter is, will go and have a count there later.

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Or maybe buy a real radon meter, quite expensive, 100$ or so on Alieepress, about twice as much locally.

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Sat, 9 Jan 2021 09:56:36 +0000) it happened Andy Burns wrote in :

Na,I got some Banquet Bar :-) Nice

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

On a sunny day (Sat, 9 Jan 2021 09:24:59 +0000) it happened The Natural Philosopher wrote in :

:-) Yea, anyways I also designed and build a gamma spectrometer, been some years since I played with all that, was even subscribed to some related google group at the time. The gamma spectrometer and that GM counter is sitting next to me:

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had no time yet to look a this, the PMT (in the large green cardboard tube) needs changing (old Russian one abused by me).

And I have this one in pieces somewhere:

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much better PMT, using scintillator crystals from ebay.... note the radium and uranium samples been 'under construction' for >14 years now.... nuclear war did not happen yet... ;-)

And and, well... this one is smaller and also gives very high levels here:

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it records GPS location and radiation level to SDcard, can be used for prospecting... my adventure in using / programming OLED displays..

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

From what I have read on latest research radiation is not a significant hazard beyond about 50% more than the blast radius anyway. If you dont get vapourised or smashed to bits, you probably wont die of cancer.

The LNT model which was used to scare people in the 1960s has been completely discredited.

what are you using as a detector?

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Of what good are dead warriors? ? Warriors are those who desire battle  
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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

On a sunny day (Sat, 9 Jan 2021 11:58:52 +0000) it happened The Natural Philosopher wrote in :

Indeed, I worked in nuculear {} twice... the first time I quit the first day as I found the guys were careless. Then serendipity had it I worked there again, in an other department, years later. Some years after I left and started my own business I did read in the paper that whole place got contaminated..

It all depends. Later ... we had the Chernobyl fallout, and where I worked the filters in the aircos were hot (radiation) and had to be properly disposed. That made me want to measure things, by that time I lost my nuculear fear btw, But nobody died, vegetables in your garden you were not recommended to eat. I did see a youtube video about the Chernobyl area where wildlife is flourishing, mostly due to the absence of people hunting it I think. That video was removed...

In the F*ckupshima disaster exactly 1 person died of radiation IIRC. Hundreds die each year in coal mine accidents..

Ruling the masses by fear is what governments do now, I did lookup some numbers and here in 2018 more people died than in 2020.. Big farma sells and it sells untested mRNA shit that several very healthy people have already died from and is not tested over generations, so will the kids you have be OK? Remember softenon. It is about big money control and politicians that are puppets of big money and completely clueless about medicine but abuse the lockdown to control everything from chat groups to people moving about. UNLESS there is a revolt they will keep locking everybody down then give you a chip implant so they can remotely kill you if you do not comply with their follies, now they use the police for that. OK,

That one uses a small geiger muller tube, basically contains gas between 2 high voltage electrodes that gets ionized if high energy particles hit it and then becomes conductive for a moment causing a small current peak. Several such high energy particles per minute is normal at ground level, on airplane level with less protection by the atmosphere much more, in space even more than that scroll down for the picture of the tube next to the GPS module, or:

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For gamma spectrometer I use crystals from ebay in front of the photo-multiplier tubes like these: NaI(Tl) 30x30 Scintillation Crystal Detector or plastic Scintillation rods

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both give of a light flash when a high energy particle hits, this is then amplified very many times by the PMT (photo mutiplier) so you get an other impulse that you can count, and in the case of that setup can measure the amplitude of, this amplitude is related to the amount of energy for each particle, and that depends on what material is 'decaying' releasing the particle so you can identify what radiates, and see who's bomb it was.... from the spectral composition. Enough info?

Reply to
Jan Panteltje

From "Int. J. Cancer: 119, 1224?1235 (2006)" via

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"The risk projections suggest that by now Chernobyl may have caused about

1,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 4,000 cases of other cancers in Europe, representing about 0.01% of all incident cancers since the accident. Models pre- dict that by 2065 about 16,000 (95% UI 3,400?72,000) cases of thy- roid cancer and 25,000 (95% UI 11,000?59,000) cases of other can- cers may be expected due to radiation from the accident, whereas several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes. Although these estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty, they provide an indication of the order of magnitude of the possible impact of the Chernobyl accident. It is unlikely that the cancer bur- den from the largest radiological accident to date could be detected by monitoring national cancer statistics. Indeed, results of analyses of time trends in cancer incidence and mortality in Europe do not, at present, indicate any increase in cancer rates?other than of thyroid cancer in the most contaminated regions?that can be clearly attributed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident."
Reply to
A. Dumas

I'm not even sure one died, although I've not been following those aspects that closely. Meanwhile 25,000 or so are missing/dead from the tsunami.

Which untested mRNA would that be, then?

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Tim
Reply to
TimS

The really important news about Chernobyl was that the predictions using LNT were in excess of 150,000 cancers across Ukraine and Eastern Europe. In fact only 60 people died and there were only 3000 preventable (if they had been given iodine pills) and curable thyroid cancers right there in Pripyat. .

More people are dying *every day* from Covid 19.

No one died from radiation at all, nor will. The company decided not to defend being sued by someone who got cancer's relatives, that's all. IIRC only one person died on site from a heart attack About 20 people died as a result if the pointless evacuation.

The Italian embassy was recalled from Tokyo to Rome, where background radiation was *ten times higher*.

Not sure about the chip implant, and I think they are actually very scared about this virus.

I never trust what a government says,I watch what they do. They haven't stopped flying to climate conferences or sold their beachside houses or gone in for a crash program of nuclear power - they know that renewable energy is profitable crap and doesn't work to reduce emissions, and they are not worried. So climate change isn't an emergency, its a political power and profit opportunity. Same for electric cars, but they are wearing masks and isolating themselves, so I think this one is real.

More would be nice, but this is not the time and place,

I have always thought that if everybody had a Geiger counter on their smart phone, they would be a lot less scared of radiation.

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"And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch". 

Gospel of St. Mathew 15:14
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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