Yay! Something where I can contribute! Iam a hardware guy trying to live in a software world, but I think I know how this one works.
> The reason is that the vendor (ACER) of the mainboard > says it is not supported, and I can not get into the > bios any more, but osol boots fine and sees 8GB. > Crucial says it's not supported because Acer says > it's not supported... This is an MCP78S based > motherboard (apparently equivalent Asus and Gigabyte > boards are _supported_ platforms for this > memory)... The chipset may support ECC memory, and reply just fine to the OS and drivers that no errors have occurred, and the memory chips may check ECC and generate the "ECC error" signal to the chip set, but if the motherboard does not have a copper trace between the pin on the memory socket that connects to the ECC error pin on the memory DIMM and the pin on the chipset that receives the error signal, the chip set will never "hear" the memory complain about ECC errors whether they happen or not. The phone line is cut. If the motherboard maker doesn't assure you it's connected by telling you that explicitly, or worse yet says it's not supported, chances are it's not supported. "Support" for a memory DIMM does not necessarily mean that the ECC works, only that the regular memory works. I did not buy a Gigabyte board for the home server I'm laboriously (for a hardware guy in a software land) getting running, because although Gigabyte says they support the ECC memory DIMMs, they do not have any BIOS means for enabling/disabling the ECC in BIOS, and that tells me that they *tolerate* ECC DIMMs rather than *using* the ECC functions. ASUS, for the same chipset in my case, has a BIOS setting for enable/disable ECC reporting, so they have at least considered. it. I have the same issue coming up, because even if ASUS lets you turn reporting on an off, that's NOT a guarantee that the copper trace is there and all connected. I read in this forum a method for inducing ECC errors involving holding a tungsten incandescent bulb near the DIMMs to induce errors. It's worth a search. I will be doing that test when I get to the point where I have the thing running well enough for the test to be meaningful. R.G. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
