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Users will never know because EC2 runs on paravirtualized kernels that don't have access to SMBIOS, which would tell us that information.

However, if we can determine what machine models they use (assuming they buy branded hardware), then we will know their chipsets, and from there, we should be able to deduce whether the RAM is ECC or not.




Actually when I was at NetApp we got pretty good at figuring out ECC failures. Just write a program that allocates 1GB array. Fill it with random data and compute a MD5 hash on it (you can do that fairly quickly). Now recompute the hash once every 5 minutes for a month. Run that on 125 instances. (that ends up being 1 Terabit of data btw) which makes a good detector for cosmic rays if it isn't ECC protected :-).




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