Info on ECC

[esstee]

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.

[Bill Thorsteinson]

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.

[esstee]

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.

[Bill Thorsteinson]

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.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

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

[Ryan Goh]

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