Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!munnari!ditmela!latcs1!mtiame!vertical!greg
From: greg@vertical.oz (Greg Bond)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: VAX Memory Test
Message-ID: <167@vertical.oz>
Date: 8 Aug 88 03:45:53 GMT
References: <3300032@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <12849@mimsy.UUCP> <1743@swlabs.UUCP>
Reply-To: greg@vertical.oz (Greg Bond)
Organization: Vertical Software, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 15

In article <1743@swlabs.UUCP> jack@swlabs.UUCP (Jack Bonn) writes:
.On a high reliability system we designed, we had an ECC error "gleaner"
.which would read and write successive memory locations in order to correct
.soft single bit errors before alpha particles (or whatever) changed them 
.into double bit errors and made them uncorrectable.
.
.Is there a more proper name for this?

Usually called memory scrubbing.  A task for the null process?

And is it usually implemented in hardware or software?  Do hardware
implementations automagically write back corrected value?
-- 
Gregory Bond,  Vertical Software, Melbourne (greg@vertical.oz)
I used to be a pessimist. Now I am a realist.