ECC disabled in the BIOS or no ECC capability, module will not load

Question

I have a new AMD 3400g PC running Ubuntu 20.04. I was looking at dmesg where I see this repeated eight times:

[    5.534686] EDAC amd64: Node 0: DRAM ECC disabled.
[    5.534688] EDAC amd64: ECC disabled in the BIOS or no ECC capability, module will not load.
                Either enable ECC checking or force module loading by setting 'ecc_enable_override'.
                (Note that use of the override may cause unknown side effects.)

How can I fix this?

---

Hardware

Gigabyte A320M-S2H AMD Socket AM4 Motherboard

AMD Ryzen 5 3400G with Radeon Vega Graphics

Output of lshw -c memory:

*-firmware
       description: BIOS
       vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
       physical id: 0
       version: F51c
       date: 07/02/2020
       size: 64KiB
       capacity: 16MiB
       capabilities: pci upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen
 int14serial int17printer acpi usb biosbootspecification uefi
  *-memory
       description: System Memory
       physical id: 9
       slot: System board or motherboard
       size: 16GiB
     *-bank:0
          description: Project-Id-Version: lshwReport-Msgid-Bugs-To: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>PO-Revision-Date: 2012-02-05 00:26+0000Last-T
ranslator: Andi Chandler <Unknown>Language-Team: English (United Kingdom) <[email protected]>MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Type: text/plain; charset=
UTF-8Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitX-Launchpad-Export-Date: 2020-07-09 17:42+0000X-Generator: Launchpad (build 4809fcb62f445aaa3ae919f7f6c
3cc7d156ea57a)Project-Id-Version: lshwReport-Msgid-Bugs-To: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>PO-Revision-Date: 2012-02-05 00:26+0000Last-Translator
: Andi Chandler <Unknown>Language-Team: English (United Kingdom) <[email protected]>MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8Cont
ent-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitX-Launchpad-Export-Date: 2020-07-09 17:42+0000X-Generator: Launchpad (build 4809fcb62f445aaa3ae919f7f6c3cc7d156e
a57a) [empty]
          product: Unknown
          vendor: Unknown
          physical id: 0
          serial: Unknown
          slot: DIMM 0
     *-bank:1
          description: DIMM DDR4 Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) 2666 MHz (0.4 ns)
          product: DDR4 3000
          vendor: A-DATA Technology
          physical id: 1
          serial: B91D0500
          slot: DIMM 1
          size: 8GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2666MHz (0.4ns)
     *-bank:2
      description: Project-Id-Version: lshwReport-Msgid-Bugs-To: FULL 

NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>PO-Revision-Date: 2012-02-05 00:26+0000Last-Translator: Andi Chandler <Unknown>Language-Team: English (United Kingdom) <[email protected]>MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitX-Launchpad-Export-Date: 2020-07-09 17:42+0000X-Generator: Launchpad (build 4809fcb62f445aaa3ae919f7f6c3cc7d156ea57a)Project-Id-Version: lshwReport-Msgid-Bugs-To: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>PO-Revision-Date: 2012-02-05 00:26+0000Last-Translator: Andi Chandler <Unknown>Language-Team: English (United Kingdom) <[email protected]>MIME-Version: 1.0Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitX-Launchpad-Export-Date: 2020-07-09 17:42+0000X-Generator: Launchpad (build 4809fcb62f445aaa3ae919f7f6c3cc7d156ea57a) [empty]
          product: Unknown
          vendor: Unknown
          physical id: 2
          serial: Unknown
          slot: DIMM 0
     *-bank:3
          description: DIMM DDR4 Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) 2666 MHz (0.4 ns)
          product: DDR4 3000
          vendor: A-DATA Technology
          physical id: 3
          serial: 6C1C0500
          slot: DIMM 1
          size: 8GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2666MHz (0.4ns)
  *-cache:0
       description: L1 cache
       physical id: b
       slot: L1 - Cache
       size: 384KiB
       capacity: 384KiB
       clock: 1GHz (1.0ns)
       capabilities: pipeline-burst internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=1
  *-cache:1
       description: L2 cache
       physical id: c
       slot: L2 - Cache
       size: 2MiB
       capacity: 2MiB
       clock: 1GHz (1.0ns)
       capabilities: pipeline-burst internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=2
  *-cache:2
       description: L3 cache
       physical id: d
       slot: L3 - Cache
       size: 4MiB
       capacity: 4MiB
       clock: 1GHz (1.0ns)
       capabilities: pipeline-burst internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=3

Solution

Add

blacklist amd64_edac_mod

to

/etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf

to suppress these messages.

Comments

[goo]

Start with solving "ECC disabled in tbe BIOS", then look at sudo lshw -c memory. Did you get your new system from a reputable vendor?

[Thomas Ward]

You know that unregistered RAM doesn't have ECC inbuilt, right? Which is why it doesn't work.

[graffe]

@ThomasWard Understood but can I get rid of the error messages?

[Thomas Ward]

I don't believe so, they're less "error" messages than they are informational notices, I don't see a direct "error" message here in this case.

[graffe]

@ThomasWard It is repeated 8 times in dmesg which makes it look more worrying.

[Rinzwind]

@Anush you probably get 1 note for each core.

[graffe]

Thank you very much.