Damus
Gabriele Svelto · 2w
A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was lookin...
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In the last week we received ~470000 crash reports, these do not represent all crashes because it's an opt-in system, the real number of crashes will be several times larger. Still, out of these ~25000 crashes have been detected as having a potential bit-flip. That's one crash every twenty potentially caused by bad/flaky memory, it's huge! And because it's a conservative heuristic we're underestimating the real number, it's probably going to be at least twice as much. 2/5
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Gabriele Svelto · 2w
In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! If I subtract crashes that are caused by resource exhaustion (such as out-of-memory crashes) this number goes up to around 15%. This is a bit skewed because users with flaky hardw...