I'm getting ready to build some (hopefully) high reliability servers with
ECC memory. I'd like to put FreeBSD on them. What facilities (if any) does
FreeBSD have for:
1) Reporting the status of ECC memory (errors corrected, errors uncorrected, etc.)?
2) Responding to uncorrectable errors?
A quick check of the archives suggests a FreeBSD version of a kernel module which pays attention to the ECC status of various chipsets is available from:
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=113348+0+archive/2001/ freebsd-hackers/20010318.freebsd-hackers
...based on the work for Linux at:
http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-ecc/
3) Mapping out portions of memory that produce repeated errors?
You can set an option in the loader to limit the physical memory available to FreeBSD, which could serve the purpose.
However, your RAM isn't a hard drive, so the ad-sector remapping used by hard drives is not fully applicable. Your machine is expected not to have any part of memory fail reproducably, but if you do, it's time to use the warranty and replace the entire chip.
It seems to me that, for an operating system that prides itself on server
stability and performance, such features are a must.
ECC is a fine idea, but the motherboard chipset pretty much does everything that is required (except for the reporting/syslogging), so the kernel doesn't need to be specially involved for the system to benefit from ECC protection.
-- -Chuck
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