To make a NAS / server I am looking for a Raspberry Pi with ECC support.
I gather that the Pi 5 and the CM 5 use RAM which has internal ECC. That's good. But do they inform the OS of when there are corrections and uncorrectable errors?
Have you guys any idea as to whether the OS running on the Pi5 or CM5 will be able to tell whether RAM has had errors or not?
Feedback welcome!
Not that I 'rely' on the tools I use...
gglAIov:
I take it you mean that that's from an AI engine and they are not reliable. If so, agreed in spades. FWIW the following is where Grok told me that on CM5 ECC was integrated with the OS. It's quite categoric. But is it true?
--- Start ---
"Unlike the standard Raspberry Pi 5, the Compute Module 5 exposes the ECC side-band signals and the BCM2712 RAS controller, so the Linux EDAC driver can report and correct errors." - Raspberry Pi Forums Thread (November 2024): James Adams (Head of Compute Module Engineering).
...
Jeff Geerling's Testing (Blog/Video, December 2024): He verified this hands-on by injecting errors and logging corrections with the brcmstb_edac driver on a CM5 prototype.
...
Linux Kernel Documentation: The merged EDAC driver (Linux 6.12+) explicitly supports BCM2712 ECC on CM5 (but not standard Pi 5), with details on how it reads RAS registers for error counts.... (search for "brcmstb_edac" commits).
--- End ---
As you can see, it does say clearly that Linux can handle ECC reports on the CM5 but thus far I've not found any sources to back it up.
Why not ask your chosen AI tool to simply provide links to sources and verify yourself? With a quick search I didn't find support for any of this ECC support stuff either, except for the standard on-die ECC.
It's funny how the AI provides direct text quotes from specific posts and Youtube videos, which would be trivial to search for. But when you do so, nothing is found. It's almost like they don't exist.
Theo
So maybe you should reconsider your choice then? I've never had a hallucinated link from chatgpt but I'm not a big user of AI.
As far as I know it's only for error correction within the RAM controller, and not reported to the OS. There is a possibility the SOC might know about it via some proprietary Broadcom mechanism.
I have found a webpage where some idiots attempting to fry a Pi 5 by running AI on it without a cooler got a fatal ECC error, but my money is on they just hallucinated the entire thing.
---druck
That is my impression too, based on admittedly sketchy data. Lets face it at that level, ecc will simply make slightly dodgy ram rock solid and merely postpone the day when there is a kernel panic due to corrupted RAM.
I cant see than knowing about it helps much.
Well indeed.
The internet may be made of cats, but these days its full of (commercially sponsored and politically motivated) lies.
If it tells you there is a problem before it becomes too severe to correct, then it may be useful so that you can replace the system.
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