topic Info on ECC in Operating System - Linux

Info on ECC

esstee — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 06:34:01 GMT

How to check the availability of ECC in RAM. is there any way in linux to find. wht r the factors determine ECC presence.
from the dmidecode i am not able to find.

Re: Info on ECC

Bill Thorsteinson — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 12:25:44 GMT

Only way to check for sure is to check the
memory modules.
I believe most current RAM modules support ECC.
However, some manufacturers scimp on the extra
memory required to provide true ECC and fake
it.

Documentation on which hardware to buy
for Linux discusses this.

Re: Info on ECC

esstee — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 07:39:05 GMT

actually my board supports ECC. But the application checks the datawidth and totalwidth of memory device. currently im getting same values (128bits) to each. actually there shld be a difference between these two values. do i need to enable the parameter CONFIG_ECC in kernel config file.

Re: Info on ECC

Bill Thorsteinson — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 16:07:36 GMT

A quick check on the net indicates that
config_ecc enable code for ECC flash memory.
I don't think this is what you are looking
for.

I don't know how an application would know
if it has ECC available. This is generally
kernel level stuff.

Search for 'Linux memtest86' for more info.
It now has some ECC testing capability.

Re: Info on ECC

Florian Heigl (new acc) — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 10:51:35 GMT

the data width of 128bit is not related to ECC or not ECC, it means that You're memory accesses are being interleaved.

Sorry I can't help You with the general issue, I usually either know I bought ECC memory or just look at the modules - if the number of memory chips is dividable by 8, they don't have ECC, if it's 9 or 18 or whatever they very probably have ECC.

if we're talking about a server system it should have ECC as most won't accept normal memory. The chipset vendor is a good hint, most servers have ServerWorks chipsets, and I don't know even one chipset built by them that supported non-ECC memory)

Florian

Re: Info on ECC

Ryan Goh — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 23:16:27 GMT

You only see whether your server is support ECC Ram using /usr/sbin/dmidecode .