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by foobiekr 3 days ago
Wow that rings a bell.

The lack of end to end ECC protection in some packet paths on very high end ASICs is something I just can’t get over.

1 comments

ECC tends to be too expensive to be used widely in hardware data paths. Most of the time hardware will use a parity bit as checking it is far less costly (both in terms of gates and power). Parity bits are usually sufficient, as the purpose is really limited to identifying hardware failure. The CRC should prevent delivery of a corrupted packet provided the hardware doesn't cheat and blindly recompute it.