Core volatility

From: Paul Koning <pkoning_at_equallogic.com>
Date: Fri Jun 25 17:07:06 2004

>>>>> "Wai-Sun" == Wai-Sun Chia <waisun.chia_at_hp.com> writes:

 Wai-Sun> I have MM11-DP (16kW parity core) in my /04 which seems to
 Wai-Sun> have a little problem.

 Wai-Sun> Several locations which I've checked seems to be losing
 Wai-Sun> content (core is supposed to be non-volatile). I've been
 Wai-Sun> debugging custom bootloaders for the past week and it has
 Wai-Sun> since gone past annoying. It's like 3 locations out of 50
 Wai-Sun> that are always reverting back to 000000 after a reboot.

 Wai-Sun> Perhaps it's the driver logic to these 3 particular cores
 Wai-Sun> that are not functioning properly? Or is it the cores
 Wai-Sun> itself?

Or a bug in your program is clearing those three words?

It seems mighty peculiar for a hardware problem to consistently turn
three words to be all zero. (Then again, what was the original
contents? Losing one bit is possible -- losing many bits is
unlikely.)

Given how core works, if you can write it, then read it several times,
and it produces the right answers, it is REALLY unlikely that the bits
would just go away by themselves after that.

I can imagine some "bit rot" mechanisms, though it's a stretch -- but
those wouldn't work in nice whole-word patterns.

      paul
Received on Fri Jun 25 2004 - 17:07:06 BST