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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, and I agree that ECC needs to be more widely available. But I think this is a major overreach:

> We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expensive when bought new than ECC RAM.

ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily. 99% of the time it's also not a "cost to society" but a cost to whoever owns/uses that machine. If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them.

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> ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily.

The price increase will be very small if manufacturers are no longer able to segment the market to make a higher margin on those who need it. No one wants even games or web browsers to crash randomly.

> If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them.

They need to be given the choice. Most people do not know they even have the choice, and they are not offered it at a reasonable price.

A cost to people in general is a cost to society.

Without quantifying the cost to society that someone's web-browser crashes sometimes, it's hard to make a rational case that this issue is so dire that it needs specific regulation.

I'm not sure making it illegal to sell consumer grade hardware is the boon for the people you imagine

Crash is the best-case outcome for a browser bit flip. Here's bitsquatting:

https://ripe92.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/sessions/112/...

No-one ever proposed making non-ECC RAM illegal, that's a straw-man.

Restricting risky items is standard practice for all governments. All the "use by" dates on food etc are from government regulation. The current experiments with "raw milk" shows that you can get away with flouting food safety regulations and not have immediate problems.

>The price increase will be very small if manufacturers are no longer able to segment the market to make a higher margin on those who need it.

AMD doesn't have this segmentation. Where's the hoard of people building systems with ECC ram? At best you have a few people on HN saying they're doing it, but in practice nobody actually does it.

ECC UDIMMs are crazy expensive, presumably because they don't have economy of scale. Mandating ECC would solve that.

Even before current RAM price craziness ECC UDIMM's were hard to find, and often more expensive than non-ECC. I was lucky to grab 128GB for similar price to non-ECC a few years back.

More people would use them, if they were available. RDIMM's do not work on normal consumer boards, so obviously people won't be using them.

AMD does segment. Only their EPYC, Pro, and some embedded models officially support ECC. Many other AMD chips have unofficial support, but if you care about data integrity, it feels like a gamble. You have to rely on suspect motherboard support and generally rely on gossip about what works well and what doesn't.

Important data should probably be worked on and stored with error-correcting codes, in addition to the hardware-provided ones. The Btrfs mention in TFA suggests that maintaining integrity of the Btrfs metadata is not considered part of the job description of Btrfs, but perhaps it should be.

BTRFS has checksums on all metadata. It isn't designed to cope with bad RAM but has been shown to be somewhat resistant to it to the degree that BTRFS developers can recognise symptoms in problem reports.

Whether a filesystem could be designed to operate in the face of random memory changes would be an interesting computer science research topic. But for getting working systems having RAM just not fail is a better option.

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