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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (134447)5/8/2001 7:44:32 PM
From: Saturn V  Read Replies (1) of 186894
 
Ref <Without error detection and correction, how did SUN's software figure out good data from bad?>

I got this info second hand from one customer who was involved .

To figure out the problem on large servers with multiple processors, SUN implemented redundancy, ie one processor module compares its results with another module which is supposed to have the identical data and instruction set. When the results did not match up, the system would halt and try to dump the status info. However this dump was not implemented cleanly,and the system would crash.

To me it sounded that SUN ended up debugging this problem in the field with the cooperation and assistance of several customers, and it took several months of painful data gathering and crashes before the light dawned at SUN. Now the reasons for the NDA become more reasonable.

Once understood the fix was to replace the processor board with new ones, which were less prone to soft errors.[Watsonyouth reported that SUN got the better L2 memory modules from IBM]. Since this was expensive and slow, SUN dragged its feet, and demanded a large amount of history of crashes before SUN would agree to replace the processor boards.
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