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Why is taxing non-ECC RAM instead of ECC RAM more of a problem in this regard than the thousands of other taxes?

The government imposed a 12% GST on all computer gear just because they felt like it. Would making ECC RAM GST exempt satisfy you?

But no-one here has advocated banning anything. Please read before replying.

I respect the time of my readers by accurately presenting my claims. It seems that everyone other than you was able to understand "My experience of memory errors".

If it's none of your business why are you getting so involved in this discussion?

Good point. Some googling suggests that plastic may be better than metal as hydrogen absorbs high energy protons without generating secondary radiation.

The people designing RAM and motherboards and the people working at JEDEC will of course know more about these things than almost everyone who reads hacker news. But I'd still prefer not to just blindly trust that they do the best things for us and have some documentation available.

Is anyone here good at navigating patent records? I would be surprised if there isn't something to be revealed in a patent but I don't know how to find it.

How do YOU propose doing this when most computer "experts" have never used ECC RAM and when it's only available in high end specialist systems that aren't on sale in regular computer stores?

I think my knowledge of the topic is pretty good but I learned from this discussion that almost all AMD CPUs support ECC RAM and you apparently just need a motherboard to match. When accompanying people who were buying "gamer" PCs (after they rejected my recommendation for a second hand workstation grade computer with ECC RAM) I never witnessed store staff saying "hey you could get a motherboard with ECC support".

The original IBM PC/XT had parity RAM. In the early PC/XT and PC/AT clones you had banks of 9 DIP sockets for memory chips with the 9th being for parity.

The DDR4 ECC RAM has 72 bits total and 64bits of data which means the same 9/8 ratio of data storage to usable data as the original PC/XT.

The Z80 and 6502 based computers in the 80s typically didn't have parity RAM. The Amiga and Macintosh were higher performance systems in the 80s which also didn't have parity RAM.

We could and should have gone straight from parity RAM to ECC RAM for everything.

I'm planning some RAM purchases for the end of this year, I expect the crash to happen in a few months.

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.

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.

I can only report what I have seen. Feel free to write your own blog post reporting what you have seen.

Yes a kernel taint is a really good idea!

For second hand gear RDIMMs are significantly cheaper than UDIMMs. As all RDIMMs have ECC that means generally ECC is cheaper for second hand systems.

Aliexpress had $50 single socket motherboards for Xeon E5-26xx CPUs and $150 dual socket motherboards last time I checked that use DDR4 RDIMMs.

Before the prices went up due to AI foolishness DDR4 RDIMMs were $1.20AU/G means means something like $US0.80/G.

I have a HP Z640 that only has 3/4 DIMM slots working. Reseating the CPU didn't help and the same CPU works perfectly in another Z640. I never found out the cause. It was sold as "unknown condition for parts" so $50 for a server that works perfectly apart from one DIMM slot is still a good deal.