News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on AVX register corruption from signal delivery. Parent comment

Re:AVX register corruption from signal delivery by asveikau on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @11:18PM (#21645204)
Additionally when you work on something that is used by a lot of people or machines, you get to see that memory and disk problems actually happen a lot in terms of raw numbers. Multiply a tiny, miniscule percentage by a lot of runs and they surface.

It is tough to not get overconfident in this diagnosis. If your code happens to see hardware problems on a routine basis, and a real bug surfaces, it is very challenging to not dismiss the latter for the former. It likely took impressive work to diagnose this as far as they have.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AVX register corruption from signal delivery by Gibbon1 on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @11:45PM (#21645314)
I remember an old game developer mentioning that they put a test for flaky cache memory in their installer and hacked up an error if it failed. Which significantly cut down the number of support calls.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:AVX register corruption from signal delivery by Gibbon1 on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @03:18PM (#21651651)
I misremembered, not support calls but bogus crash reports from flaky cache. Bogus crash reports like this are terrible because they aren't caused by bugs. And it's impossible to prove a negative.
[ Parent | on HN ]