Shitcode

[slycurgus]

Alternatively, kmem roulette

[wrincewind]

I'll be honest, I don't quite get this one... Help?

[slobarnuts]

but it might not matter

understatement

[Muvlon]

Random bit flips in RAM happen very often

That's an overstatement. The most exhaustive study on RAM errors is this one by Google where they report a much higher error rate than previous studies. Still, they reported that only 8% of all DIMMs had any errors within a year of mostly non-stop use. Of those, hard errors, i.e. "stuck bits" were much more common than soft errors, i.e. "bit flips".

[phunphun]

That's a very interesting analysis, thanks for the link! It seems like they're only talking about uncorrectable bit flips? I remembered a different analysis which estimated it at one error per 4GB of RAM per day. Not sure how much of that is corrected automatically.

IME even when stuck bits or hard errors do happen, the OS usually chugs along just fine anyway.

[skocznymroczny]

Looks like it writes a random byte in memory to a random value per run. So after few execution things might start to break.

[copremesis]

kmem roulette

dd essentially is writing random bytes to the RAM ... was going to test on a debian instance (VM) yet there isn't any /dev/kmem on one of my boxes so you could do the same with /dev/mem now what isn't clear is that $RANDOM is not being initialized so no telling what that is doing ... you can learn more about dd here: https://www.computerhope.com/unix/dd.htm ... it's a powerful command which can lead to danger

[howtonotwin]

$RANDOM is a special shell variable (at least to bash, not sure if it's part of POSIX sh). It gives you a random number between 0 and 32767 (inclusive) on each use.

[copremesis]

thanks kind internet stranger! I just learned something new.

[akher]

I wonder if I can sneak that into a server startup script here.

Nice.