His Lenovo's RAM Failed, and Soldering Left Him No Way to Fix It
The Curse of Soldered RAM
A Fedora user's Lenovo X1 Carbon started crashing browser tabs and flipping its BTRFS root to read-only. Memtest86+ confirmed bad RAM almost immediately — but with memory soldered to the motherboard, there was no DIMM to swap. He instead transcribed the faulty addresses and passed them to the Linux kernel via memmap, working around a RedHat grub2-mkconfig bug that mangled the values, to keep the machine alive until a replacement arrives.
In the search for even thinner laptops (because a DIMM socket adds ~6mm of depth) and maybe cynically ensure that any failures result in needing to buy a whole new laptop, RAM is now soldered directly to the motherboard of most laptops.
- LeoPanthera
I'm stunned that "mapping out" blocks of bad RAM is a thing you can do. It reminds me of the old days when hard disks had to be "low-level formatted" first (ask your parents, kids) and it would ask you for a list of bad sectors to map out. Sometimes hard disks would even come with a list of known bad ones printed on the top.
- bugake
The race to make laptops thinner is pointless. I wish I could buy a thicker laptop that is more robust, repairable, expandable, and has better cooling, with the extra space filled with batteries.
- Neil44
We used to buy Dells with minimum RAM and add quality third party RAM for way less than Dell wanted for it. They also use ram quantity to leverage other specs we're not bothered about. Of course they are moving to soldered.
- GeekyBear
> But in the search for even thinner laptops
The LP in LPDDRx isn't about creating thinner devices.
The LP stands for Low Power and is aimed at making devices that draw less power resulting in a longer battery life.
- Tade0
The RAM situation is beyond helpless. I was meaning to buy another 32GB stick for my Framework, but they're out of stock and so are any validated alternatives.
I've found just one store that carries them, but seeing as they reported "50+ units in stock" I called the store and learned that "the item is available through a third party vendor within four business days", but looking at that the ratings it would be more like three weeks.