linux-kernel - Re: Aerospace and linux

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Message-ID: <AANLkTik3XiOjYM67RdPG-3RM3rY-0vondiMmJsETAHfX@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:38:10 -0600
From:	Brian Gordon <legerde@...il.com>
To:	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Aerospace and linux

> It's also a serious consideration for standard servers.
Yes. Good point.

> On server class systems with ECC memory hardware does that.

> Normally server class hardware handles this and the kernel then reports
> memory errors (e.g. through mcelog or through EDAC)

Agreed.  EDAC is a good and sane solution and most companies do this.
Some do not due to naivity or cost reduction.   EDAC doesn't cover
processor registers and I have fairly good solutions on how to deal
with that in tiny "home-grown" tasking systems.

On the more exotic end, I have also seen systems that have dual
redundant processors / memories.  Then they add compare logic between
the redundant processors that compare most pins each clock cycle.   If
any pins are not identical at a clock cycle, then something has gone
wrong (SEU, hardware failure, etc..)

> Lower end systems which are optimized for cost generally ignore the
> problem though and any flipped bit in memory will result
> in a crash (if you're lucky) or silent data corruption (if you're unlucky)

Right!  And this is the area that I am interested in.  Some people
insist on lowering the cost of the hardware without considering these
issues.  One thing I want to do is to be as diligent as possible (even
in these low cost situations) and do the best job I can in spite of
the low cost hardware.

So, some pages of RAM are going to be read-only and the data in those
pages came from some source (file system?).   Can anyone describe a
high level strategy to occasionaly provide some coverage of this data?

So far I have thought about page descriptors adding an MD5 hash
whenever they are read-only and first being "loaded/mapped?" and then
a background daemon could occasionaly verify.   Does tripwire
accomplish this kind of detection by monitoring the underlying
filesystem (I dont think so)?
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