Re: marching through all physical memory in software

From: Tim Small
Date: Fri Jan 30 2009 - 16:03:16 EST


Eric W. Biederman wrote:
A background software scrubber simply has the job of rewritting memory
to it's current content so that the data and the ecc check bits are
guaranteed to be in sync

Don't you just need to READ memory? The memory controller hardware takes care of the rest in the vast majority of cases.

You only need to rewrite RAM if a correctable error occurs, and the chipset doesn't support automatic write-back of the corrected value (a different problem altogether...). The actual memory bits themselves are refreshed by the hardware quite frequently (max of every 64ms for DDR2, I believe)...

Cheers,

Tim.
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