On 07/08/2014 01:22 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
On 7/8/2014 9:25 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
Physical servers can be told to skip certain parts of their POST, especially the memory test. Memory tests are redundant with ECC.
but, you HAVE to zero ALL of memory with ECC to initialize it.
True enough; but this shouldn't take five minutes on a server with multiple GB/s memory bandwidth. My Dell 6950's take a full five minutes to POST, and that's ridiculous. There's eight cores; each core has enough bandwidth to its local RAM (NUMA, of course) where it should be able to sustain 2GB/s zeroing without a lot of trouble; that's a rate of 16GB/s aggregate, and my 32GB of RAM should be zeroed in 2 seconds or so. Not five minutes.
It's still not as bad as our Sun Enterprise 6500 with 18GB, though, which takes about a minute per GB, which is also ridiculous (it's also NUMA, and the Sun firmware does start up each CPU to test it's own local RAM blocks).