I always love it when folks who don’t actually know what they’re talking about, comment like they do…
It’s not just the browser. This example is the browser, but it’s your entire system stability that is affected by random bit flips.
Comment on 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
Retail4068@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoLet’s spend a ton of extra money minimizing edge case crashing in a browser!!!
🙄
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Retail4068@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
[deleted]vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
There’s a jump instruction by an address read from RAM, a bit flip occurred so a condition “if friend greet else kill” worked as “if friend rape else kill”. Absolutely anything can happen, that wasn’t determined by program design flaws and errors. A digital computer is a deterministic system (sometimes there are intentional non-deterministic elements like analog-based RNGs), this is non-deterministic random changes of the state.
In concrete terms - things break without reason. A perfect program with no bugs, if such exists, will do random wrong things if bit flips occur. Clear enough?
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
In practice preftct programs do exist, they just have to be small enough to do formal verification
bruhduh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I have lga 1356 xeon 2470v2 with 64gb ddr3 ecc ram, cheap and good setup
Retail4068@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You enthusiasts server people, the dozens of you, are not the average consumer.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Who is talking about average consumers? We’re not trying to market something here.
Retail4068@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Linus was. The answer is Linus. 🤦♂️
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Yes and? Us here are talking over a federated social platform. None of us are the average consumer.
Eheran@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
DDR5 pretty much has ECC built in.
greybeard@feddit.online 2 weeks ago
Linus would disagree with you there. It’s got a form of ECC, but it isn’t the same as server RAM ECC.
BladeFederation@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
When ECC no longer costs a mortgage, I will look into upgrading.
roofuskit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah I can’t remember the last time my browser crashed. No way I’m upgrading all that hardware to avoid something that happens that seldom.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Probably not the use case you’d want to buy ECC for. I considered it for my homebuild because I figured I might process a lot of data at once, and I would appreciate the piece of mind… but I still decided no because I could get more ram for the same price if it were not ECC.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t know about you, but I use my RAM for a lot more than a browser.
Retail4068@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 2 weeks ago
Simple stuff like a calculator can be just as broken by a bitflip as more complex things. You woulndn’t want your calculator to say 1 + 1 = 2049.
If you want to rely on your computer, ECC RAM is required.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Exactly, one of the ‘nerd edge cases’ (as the now removed comment mentioned) is that I use ZFS on my NAS.
There’s lots of checksumming and encryption. Errors in that process are not acceptable and could potentially cause data loss. Since the one of the points of using ZFS is the enhanced data integrity, not using ECC means losing out on that guarantee.
Retail4068@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
At what% does this effect the average consumer. And additionally in a critical easy. Can you cite, literally one case, where the presence of ECC would have been critical beyond an occasional annoyance. 1.
toddestan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Bit rot is real, I’ve seen it first hand in plenty of cases. While I tend to blame the storage device, for infrequently accessed files that have been copied multiple times from different drives, I can’t rule out RAM or some other source of the corruption.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Improved overall system stability and data accuracy? With error correction, you can also push performance farther, since you can tolerate a certain amount of errors, instead of needing to aim for 0% error rate.