Slashdot Mirror
Serious Computer Glitches Can Be Caused By Cosmic Rays (computerworld.com)
The Los Alamos National Lab wrote in 2012 that "For over 20 years the military, the commercial aerospace industry, and the computer industry have known that high-energy neutrons streaming through our atmosphere can cause computer errors." Now an anonymous reader quotes Computerworld:
When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don't be so quick to blame the manufacturer. Cosmic rays -- or rather the electrically charged particles they generate -- may be your real foe. While harmless to living organisms, a small number of these particles have enough energy to interfere with the operation of the microelectronic circuitry in our personal devices... particles alter an individual bit of data stored in a chip's memory. Consequences can be as trivial as altering a single pixel in a photograph or as serious as bringing down a passenger jet.
A "single-event upset" was also blamed for an electronic voting error in Schaerbeekm, Belgium, back in 2003. A bit flip in the electronic voting machine added 4,096 extra votes to one candidate. The issue was noticed only because the machine gave the candidate more votes than were possible. "This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public," said Bharat Bhuva. Bhuva is a member of Vanderbilt University's Radiation Effects Research Group, established in 1987 to study the effects of radiation on electronic systems.
Cisco has been researching cosmic radiation since 2001, and in September briefly cited cosmic rays as a possible explanation for partial data losses that customer's were experiencing with their ASR 9000 routers.
A "single-event upset" was also blamed for an electronic voting error in Schaerbeekm, Belgium, back in 2003. A bit flip in the electronic voting machine added 4,096 extra votes to one candidate. The issue was noticed only because the machine gave the candidate more votes than were possible. "This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public," said Bharat Bhuva. Bhuva is a member of Vanderbilt University's Radiation Effects Research Group, established in 1987 to study the effects of radiation on electronic systems.
Cisco has been researching cosmic radiation since 2001, and in September briefly cited cosmic rays as a possible explanation for partial data losses that customer's were experiencing with their ASR 9000 routers.
Whenever a user calls up to ask why his computer rebooted after I install an update, I say... drumroll, please... gamma radiation.
I was convinced that is was a lousy programming job by Microsoft that has more attention to fancy UX components rather than stability. I am waiting for the confirmation that the fact that Excel start searching every known (network) drive for a license if it can't connect to the online subscription service, for every operation, must be due to black matter. Unless it crashes when it tries to display that warning message, then it's just some cosmic ray again. So relieved!
When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don't be so quick to blame the manufacturer.
Why not? According to the article, it is well-known phenomena:
For over 20 years the military, the commercial aerospace industry, and the computer industry have known that high-energy neutrons streaming through our atmosphere can cause computer errors.
So if it is a well-known problem, and manufacturers are ignoring the problem and creating devices susceptible to such interference, why can I not blame the manufacturer for making hardware with known problems? I would blame the manufacturer if a hearing aid was picking up local radio stations, so why not here?
Sun blamed cosmic rays for causing CPU cache corruption and system crashes in their high-end enterprise systems. http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2...
This is why ECC is used to protect memory and data busses. At least on the good stuff :-) . One of the issues is die shrink. As the minimum detail slze of the IC process gets smaller, the potential for radiation to flip a bit gets higher.
Silicon-on-sapphire is the main way to implement silicon-on-insulator, which is more protective of radiation bit flips and less likely to latch-up. But since these have historically been required only for space satellites, they have been horribly expensive. Imagine running an entire IC fabrication just to make a few chips. As there are more applications for rad-hard chips, the price could fall.
Bruce Perens.
Oh THATS what happened to the emails. Global warming is bullshit, but those cosmic rays will getcha every time...yeah -_- Witness the birth of oncoming onslaught of pathetic excuses. Not doubting the logic at all, especially given how mass power outages have happened because of this, but I got feeling someone will do research near "HAARP" and, "Oh no...Why god why!...all well." Â\_(ãf)_/Â
"Cosmic rays, man." -- Bethesda
Actually, wouldn't cosmic rays be capable of flipping bits even in ECC memory and processors, thereby making the whole ECC thing useless? Particularly in more recent process nodes, where the lithography scale is approaching atoms, and where cosmic rays would have a far greater effect?
As they get smaller, I think we are fast approaching the point where it will be thought that a silicon atom is too big to allow for a shrink, and that semiconductor physicists will have to start looking at carbon and maybe even boron
When your computer crashes or phone freezes, don't be so quick to blame the manufacturer.
If my computer crashes or phone freezes, it's almost certainly the fault of the person who released the software without properly debugging it. Cosmic rays are very low on the list of reasons why your device has malfunctioned.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Your ECC RAM won't matter much if the cosmic ray hits the CPU registers. Or a cell in a block of your flash storage.
#DeleteFacebook
Follow through the links: a cosmic ray caused problems, the jets misbehaved for a bit but the duplicated systems protected them from a crash - as they are supposed to after a malfunction.
Shouldn't "News for Nerds" be news to nerds?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually, wouldn't cosmic rays be capable of flipping bits even in ECC memory and processors, thereby making the whole ECC thing useless?
No, this is what ECC is for. If a bit is flipped, you can detect it. If you have enough parity bits, you can even detect which bit is flipped, and correct it on the fly. Computation occurs as normal and an error shows up in the syslog.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The odds of a cosmic ray hitting your memory at the exact right spot to flip a bit are one in hundreds of millions. There are just enough computers out there that it happens from time to time. The odds of FIVE rays hitting just the right locations to flip four bits and a parity bit are, pardon the pun, astronomical.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Your ECC RAM won't matter much if the cosmic ray hits the CPU registers.
Some modern CPUs have ECC cache RAM. Is it not possible to have ECC registers?
Or a cell in a block of your flash storage.
Filesystems can have ECC, too. And in fact, so can storage devices.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even though market participents are warned about this by exchanges, you do have to wonder, if it makes it into the BOFH excuse calendar, can you really take it seriously?
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
... during my IT career?
I could have used this as a dodge after I fucked something up in the system.
I did the sunspot thing back in 2012.
"Russia," seems to work well, though.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
We are already there:
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...
As the IBM article states they are working with Samsung and Global Foundries while the other article is about Intel that is 3 of the major chip fab companies stating they are moving to silicon-germanium hybrid crystal over pure silicon for exactly this reason. Also the fabs on a new process node take time to setup and they need to be ready before circuit design comes in to fab prototype batches so they are usually a couple of years ahead of what is commercially available on the market.
Now if only companies like Intel would actually provide
Yes, if only ...
Have gnu, will travel.
Are people really less knowledgeable about computers now than they were in the 80's?
I'm certain it's on the list somewhere.
Have gnu, will travel.
This was proposed as an SDI weapon in the 1980. And it wasn't just the US. Russia too, unless you don't believe they do stuff like that or have the capability.
Are people really less knowledgeable about computers now than they were in the 80's?
If you mean on average, I think the answer is probably yes. More people know how to operate them now, but then, operating them has become orders of magnitude simpler.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, absolutely! Have you never sat down with a IT graduate from the 2000's to figure out what they actually know about computer hardware?
Maybe that's the case for now, but who knows what will happen with stacked 3D memory?
But much more frequently, problems are caused by somebody f**king something up. You shouldn't be looking to cosmic rays until you're pretty sure it's not just stupidity in action.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Costs money.
It takes up more power, more die space, you need more RAM chips, etc.
Your phone or computer crash is thousands of times (if not millions) more likely to have been caused by the manufacturer/coders error or fault than cosmic rays. Anyone that decides to consider cosmic rays as a more likely answer deserves to continue to experience their issues.
As a student intern working at a lab in 1992 my project was to build a cosmic hodoscope to record cosmic rays. It involved scintillators, fiber optics, HV photomultiplier tubes, a timing coincidence system, radiation sources for calibration and testing, etc. When two PMT's fired within the same timing gate window it was the result of a cosmic ray and we could determined the path of the cosmic ray. The interesting thing was that this showed that there are quite a few energetic cosmic rays reaching the surface of the earth and that they have no problem passing through the atmosphere, buildings, etc. It's very real.
prsdntl
Are people really less knowledgeable about computers now than they were in the 80's?
If you mean on average, I think the answer is probably yes.
If you mean on average out of the total number of computer users or programmers, then yes (they are less knowledgable), because that pool has increased by lots and lots.
If you mean on average out of all people, then no. I suspect there are far more people that know what ECC does now than did in the 80's, and the total population count hasn't gone up as much as that number, so there are more people on average, and in total, that know about the inner workings of computers.
I think there are just far more people touching stuff they know very little about, and we assume they must know *something*, but they don't.
Compare it to early cars, where every operator had to know a bunch of stuff about it just to keep it running, but it was simple enough that the average operator could learn that stuff. Now, most cars make maintenance very difficult, and many drivers would be hard pressed to do simple things like changing the oil, flushing the radiator, replacing a brake light, replacing the battery, changing a tire, jump starting, etc. That said, there are WAAAAY more people that know WAAY more about cars now than there were in 1930. It's just shifted more to professional/hobbyist knowledge than something that every operator is required to know.
More people know how to operate them now, but then, operating them has become orders of magnitude simpler.
I suspect the math works out the same as Shannon's noisy channel theorem. And that as the chance of bit flips (noise) increases due to die shrinking, you can increase the error correction coding to compensate for it up to some theoretical limit.
e.g.. instead of ECC memory having one parity bit for every 8 data bits, you increase it to two parity bits per 8 data bits, and it can withstand a higher error rate.
Is anyone surprised that if you store things once, and reference the one place alone, that you get screwed on occasion?
Is the word "co-roberation" new? How about "validation", "authentication", "verification", and, oh, I don't know, "paper-trail"?
It's electronic information, not magic. The benefit of not carving into stone is that you can readily duplicate information into multiple places. Use it.
RAID.
Why didn't that voting machine have ECC memory? Why didn't the software have bounds checking?
Yes, I know it's common, I use some software (from a very large company that was run by a guy you don't go hunting with) that when it hits a some input data with a negative integer IT ATTEMPTS TO ALLOCATE NEGATIVE MEMORY, and of course, crashes - but things that stupid should never happen (especially since it's supposed to deal with very noisy data). If it's out of range for a bit of code to work on then don't let it in! Don't just check in one place and hope that catches everything, check everywhere that out of bounds data is a problem.
Indeed, that could be a problem, but the failure to teach computer science graduates mathematics to the level of high school probability and statistics is a far greater problem in my opinion. It results in posts like the above.
We've always known this. This is why we have ECC memory on servers.
Kriston
Yeah, I forgot that boron is a dopant. Although then, you'd have no dopants that are significantly smaller than carbon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And, whaddaya know, you can buy them pretty much everywhere. For voting machines, medical applications, etc. they should obviously be used.
It's also why systems on spacecraft such as the Space Shuttle had what's called the Data Processing System. It consisted of four systems with identical software and an extra one with the same hardware but a different implementation with the same goals. They checked each others' decisions, and a majority "vote" would lock out the differing system.
Kriston
Isn't this why ZFS exists?
We've known this since the 1980s...and the more dense/smaller the transistors get the greater the likelihood of it happening.
This is news, but it's literally from the previous century.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
All servers should have ECC memory at a minimum.
Exactly nothing is done to examine whether the voting system is accurate, yet they expect us to believe in it.
Your ECC RAM won't matter much if the cosmic ray hits the CPU registers. Or a cell in a block of your flash storage.
Also, your ECC RAM won't matter much if you get run over by a truck. So what? ECC RAM will help if there is a bitflip in your ECC RAM, that's what it's for and that's what the benefit is. It's not going to solve world hunger either, and nobody ever suggested that it would.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Yep, it's good news. Very useful.
Dumb user error can be blamed on IT problems
IT problems can be blamed on computer glitches
Computer glitches can be blamed on cosmic rays
As a result, dumb user errors can and shall always be blamed on cosmic rays
aaaaaaa
It's just shifted more to professional/hobbyist knowledge than something that every operator is required to know.
Isn't that implied by the site we're on?
Well the marketing for high quality stuff is lousy. I buy phones around $100. There are cheaper phones, but they clearly do not meet my requirements. At this price, I can't tell if a given device will meet my needs or not. Perhaps I should go higher, but all devices fail to stand out at any price $100 or higher.
Still, there's much to be made by taking advantage of people who have more money than sense that sell equipment with minor issues on eBay because they don't know much about how to fix them. Just scored me what should be quite a deal. Still waiting for the machine to come though, to confirm my expectation.
Channel ID 18 19 20 22
Total Unerrored Codewords 243285196329 243285196266 243285195305 243285196923
Total Correctable Codewords 1094 1439 1100 1342
Total Uncorrectable Codewords 16934 16642 17884 16943
Don't know what normal values are.
Because studies have been done to ascertain this information.
The situation for AMSAT is still pretty bad, as far as I've heard. As a radio amateur group (and one that has launched quite a few satellites as space hitch-hikers) they can't afford the good stuff, but they get some donated by NASA and some of the commercial satellite companies. Only a few years ago they were still using the 1802 as their main vehicle controller, as that was their main choice in silicon-on-sapphire CPUs. They get some donations of space-qualified solar cells. They scrub their memory continuously, They use no boot ROMS. The program is loaded entirely by hardware, and then the CPU is started.
Bruce Perens.
That's a good argument for Gray code.
I have to take issue with the assumption that nothing clears errors better than a hard reset. There are very many known strategies for dealing with errors on a running system, and a reset only clears persistent and cumulative error, rather than transient ones. Since we can assume that your computer doesn't keep the same data in memory all of the time, most will be transient.
Bruce Perens.
Tee hee.
The legal definition of Act of God does not itself admit to the existence of a deity. Just natural phenomena which are beyond human agency to predict or prevent.
Bruce Perens.
Really earlier than that, Fermi expected it and had equipment shielded and double-shielded when testing the first nuclear bomb. But we should not confuse cosmic rays and EMP.
Bruce Perens.
Read this paper. He postulates 2 soft errors per year for a Xeon 7500 with 24 MB L3 cache at sea level in New York City. He also gives figures for static RAM, which is the stuff of CPU registers.
Bruce Perens.
This isn't either, but closer to a cosmic ray, just lower energy. Pointing a particle accelerator at warheads to fry their electronics. Which it would.
We did precisely this for NASA as part of a systems we built and am very familiar...or was a long time ago...with radiation damage and failure modes to electronics in space. Sometimes the shielding can make things worse. Instead of going straight through a transistor, a collision can occur upstream sending a spray of other particles with the right energy to do damage. There are parts of the upper atmosphere that are more radioactive than the area above or below.
The situation for AMSAT is still pretty bad, as far as I've heard. As a radio amateur group (and one that has launched quite a few satellites as space hitch-hikers) they can't afford the good stuff, but they get some donated by NASA and some of the commercial satellite companies. Only a few years ago they were still using the 1802 as their main vehicle controller, as that was their main choice in silicon-on-sapphire CPUs. They get some donations of space-qualified solar cells. They scrub their memory continuously, They use no boot ROMS. The program is loaded entirely by hardware, and then the CPU is started.
Bruce, what do you mean by "...no boot ROMS.... loaded entirely by hardware" ?
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
ECC Memory isn't the only added cost, you also need a motherboard and processor that supports it.
For your information, ever since AMD's Athlon 64, most x86 compatible hardware has had its Northbridge *inside the processor package*.
That means that the memory controller is inside the package of your CPU.
The mother board is basically only traces that connect your CPU and the memory slots directly.
A glorified cable/connector.
(In practice, there is a bit more, regarding powering the RAM slots, etc. but you got the general idea : not much smarts in the motherboard between RAM and CPU.
Smarts is in the "Southbridge" : between the CPU and peripherals)
On the AMD side of things, nearly every CPU has ECC capability in its build-in memory controller.
For a motherboard to support ECC, it basically means just having a few instruction to activate it in the EFI/BIOS.
On the Intel side of things, it's marketed as an enterprise feature, so it's only available on the more expensive business/workstation hardware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
SECDED codes can detect up to two errored bits per codeword, not per byte. In modern systems, a typical codeword is 64 bits of data plus 8 bits of parity (where multiple parity bits cover each data bit).
Compare it to early cars, where every operator had to know a bunch of stuff about it just to keep it running, but it was simple enough that the average operator could learn that stuff.
Are you really going back to early cars here? I mean, I think we can break it into basically three eras. The early age of cars was characterized by horseless carriages. The prior age of cars was ushered in around the 1930s or 1940s, where automatic transmissions appeared, the control layout became standard, and vehicles were pretty much all fully enclosed unless they were specifically designed to be a cabriolet. And the modern age of cars came with the O2 sensor, and self-tuning.
For the earliest cars, it was common to hire a driver and mechanic, because keeping the car moving was a full-time job. Maybe halfway through the period it became reasonable for people to maintain their own vehicles, as the reliability came up to the level where you didn't have to be an engineer to keep it going.
Obviously, the middle era was the time when any schmoe with a set of wrenches could fix a car. There was very limited availability of fluids, so vehicles were engineered to use what was ubiquitous, which was all the same. Vehicles were easy to maintain because they wasted a lot of space. On the other hand, reliability was nowhere.
Most modern cars are staggeringly reliable, but maintenance is a mixed bag. Oil changes tend to remain trivial, but transmission oil changes may be a massive PITA. You have to get the car flat and level and add fluid from the bottom while running on a disturbing percentage of modern vehicles, and there is no dipstick. A radiator flush is exactly as hard as it ever was, and you install a flush tee the same as ever. The battery, on the other hand, might be in the wheel well behind the plastic inner fender. Even if it's someplace supposedly convenient like the trunk, it might be a PITA to get in and out as it is in my A8. And you have to jump start from the battery, too. There's no redundant terminal under the hood. That would have just added weight and crap so they skipped it. The starter takes power from beneath the frame rail on the right side, you can apply power there if you have to but again, what a PITA. On the other hand, even reasonable estimates of the service intervals are all much longer than cars from the prior era. And on the gripping hand, nobody is meant to own cars like that for more than half a decade or so. They are for rich fucks who can afford to turn them over :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can protect registers with ECC, but any CPU that does that is likely to want some (more complicated) scheme to protect data in the execution units as well, and doing that is more costly. You need something like majority voting of 3+ units, or you need logic that updates ECC bits coherently, which I think is not well-researched.
It's never lupus, and it's never a radiation-induced bit flip. (Until it is one, or both, of those.)
Why didn't that voting machine have ECC memory? Why didn't the software have bounds checking?
Because if one bit-flip changes the totals by more than 1, then the software was designed wrong.
Each vote should be a separate record - the totals should only be a summation. You can keep a running tally separately as a backup record, but that should not be your only count. If one bit flips, one vote changes - not one bit on the total.
Only n00bs think it's a glitch...real programmers use butterflies. They open their hands and let their delicate wings flap once. The disturbance ripple outward, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the upper atmosphere. These cause momentary pockets of higher-pressure air to form, which act as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays, focusing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
And your truck won't matter much if it gets run over by an asteroid. So what?
#DeleteFacebook
No, seriously, what are the odds of a cosmic ray flipping a bit?
0.1, 0.000000001, 1e-15, 1e-30?
It's easy to blame cosmic rays, but a subtle bug is far more likely.
.
Except, you know, all the people who HAVE actually looked for voter fraud and have found nothing that would affect a result.
LEO doesn't have as much of a radiation problem, they are below the Van Allen belts.
Bruce Perens.
No boot ROM means that a hardware device constructed from discrete logic and analog chips directly demodulates digital data from the radio, addresses the memory, and writes the data. Once this process is completed, it de-asserts the RESET line of the CPU and the CPU starts executing from an address in memory. Really no ROM!
Bruce Perens.
Doesn't matter when the electorate is flooded with morons.
ECC, RAID and some sort of parallel computation should be in place for voting systems. It should be possible to run the same code on multiple processors and check that the results are the same in real-time.
Same on any industrial safety system. Often these are triplicated or quadruplicated. I actually prefer triplicated since you don't end up with an even vote on a situation.
Except that they found irregularities that were ignored. And that wasn't a very widespread effort. You can't trust a flawed system. Most of the time, that doesn't matter, but for the voting system to matter, we must have confidence in it.
Data formats are designed without taking bit flips into account even today.
No, seriously, what are the odds of a cosmic ray flipping a bit?
Scientists do study this. The estimate is that a typical computer will have a hit about once a year.
The circuits get smaller, the chips get bigger and more devices are used. It seems to all cancel out and the odds have been about the same for 40 years or more.
But you are correct, software errors are far more likely.
I vaguely recall a study way back when that looked at stray radiation vs the computer case: Metal is helpful as shielding; plastic is not. D'oh!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
An entire field of study devoted to this exact problem (Radiation Effects) has been around since the 70's at least for aerospace purposes. That said, neutrons have only become a serious concern for terrestrial applications in recent years, as process geometries have gotten small enough and parts have gotten dense enough that neutron upset becomes less of an occasional annoyance and more of a constant problem.
Generally you test electronics for Single Event Effects (SEE) at a cyclotron, and it used to be NASA, Lockheed, Boeing and the likes who were doing all the testing. More recently, though, Cisco and Intel have begun doing a lot of testing of their own. Cisco is known to put an entire server rack at a time in a neutron beam to see what goes boom.
Nonsense. I have 16GB of ECC RAM in my NAS at home, and I can assure you I spent almost two orders of magnitude less than $500/GB. IIRC, it was closer to $10/GB.
Good point. Personally I think things like the Diebold voting machines (designed by a convicted fraudster!) fail on many levels. I'm a big fan of very simple paper ballots and big high speed scanners to collate everything. When something is contested (which seems to happen someplace in just about every election anywhere) paper ballots allow a fallback all the way to manual verification if necessary.
One full page newspaper ad from the week the IBM PC was announced, called it "The IBM of Personal Computers." The "B" in IBM is for "Business." The IBM PC was a business machine, not a toy. What distinguished it from Apple and Radio Shack computers? It was the first PC to provide parity memory.
The IBM PC had parity memory, not ECC. On a parity error, BIOS displayed an error message on the top line of the display and stopped the computer (HALT or disabled interrupts then loop, such that the error message remained visible.) If I recall correctly, restart required the BRS (Big Red Switch) to power down and then up, rather than <alt><ctrl><del>. When the computer was powered up again, as always back then, BIOS did a Power On Self Test that among other things, tested memory.
The parity memory meant that the IBM PC produced results as programmed, or not at all.
Some customers did not really care. They preferred results, even if incorrect ones. Clone companies started providing a BIOS setup option to disable the parity checking. Next they started saving 11% on memory costs by not including parity memory bits at all. Customers did not care. The IT trade press and personal computing trade press did not raise a ruckus, and almost never included the presence or absence of parity memory in product reviews.
Then IBM had started to become "Market Driven." The market did not value it, so eventually, IBM dropped parity memory from end-user PC's, but retained ECC memory for servers. At an internal IBM technical conference, I asked IBM Executives whether anything had changed that made parity memory unnecessary in PC's. The heads of both the PC Division and IBM Microelectronics (IBM made its own memory back then) agreed that dropping parity memory was the wrong thing to do, from both technical and validity-of-results perspectives, but was something the market did not value.
The follow-on was for the industry to create premium "workstation" class end-user computers with ECC. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no company offers laptops, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, or IoT devices with ECC.
No boot ROM means that a hardware device constructed from discrete logic and analog chips directly demodulates digital data from the radio, addresses the memory, and writes the data. Once this process is completed, it de-asserts the RESET line of the CPU and the CPU starts executing from an address in memory. Really no ROM!
Ok! (Very) remote pre-boot DMA, nice!
Thanks for the expdanded explanation,
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
ECC memory has been available for a long time and most servers use it, I have no idea why voting machines and other important devices wouldn't.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)