Haiku does not handle flaky/bad ram gracefully

[stargatefan]

I had a good sized fight today with a functional windows machine that had a stick of ram that could best be described as flaky. It was a older p4 machine with 768mb of ddr 267. The windows install ran fine "seemed uneffected but slow" but haiku would go into a revolt of non compliane and KDL and GDB. I replace the failing sticks of ram but it occurs to me that haiku needs a way to isolate and ignore bad ram sectors.

I distreoyed all the error logs when I found the bad sticks as I knew what the cuase was. It was disturbing however to see windows boot and operate just fine while haiku had no stability in anything but desktop.

[zooey]

I don't know of any operating system that handles broken RAM gracefully. The difference in behaviour that you've seen may be related to how each OS allocates the memory it uses (so some might use bits from the broken module earlier than others).

[axeld]

Actually, there are operating systems that can do that, but this obviously requires hardware support as well in order to find broken memory in the first place. You will only find such mechanism in main frame like systems (IIRC some IBM Power systems can do that running AIX).