Solar Designer <[email protected]> writes: >I also worry about risk of software bugs that a simple 0/1 flag may be more >susceptible to than e.g. magic values would be. Maybe we can identify a >reasonable level of defensive programming without going for slippery slope
You can write code that deals with bit-flips (SEEs to use the correct term) and the like but you pretty much need to do it end-to-end if you're worried about real-world bit-flips, and that's a *lot* of work. If you want the full gory details: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/software_faults.pdf To answer a question from another post, ECC RAM won't necessarily help you because you can get faults like word-line upsets that ECC won't detect, I've got a second talk that covers that if anyone's interested. The upside is that most modern desktop/ server processors are essentially rad-hard so faults in the CPU or data in on-CPU cache memory aren't so much a concern any more. Peter.
