Sadly, that’s pretty much it.
Unless you’re choosing a motherboard that explicitly mentions ECC support (like the ASRock Rack server boards, or one of a couple of Asus boards), it really is pot luck. Even then, the level of error correction the completed system actually supports is… inconsistent
If you’ve seen Wendell’s latest video about ZFS, you’re likely to have seen the previous interview with Greg KH. The key takeway being “computers barely work”. Anecdotally, ECC on Ryzen very much falls into this category. Having a system successfully boot with ECC DIMMs is just the tip of the iceberg.
- Does the system correctly detect that the DIMMs support ECC?
- Will ECC errors/corrections be reported by the OS in a meaningful way? (Hopefully this is the case in most Linux distros by now)
- Will a BIOS update from your motherboard vendor, which addresses a separate issue, prevent your perfectly functional ECC system from booting at all? (Thanks ASRock)
If none of this puts you off and you’re keen to go down this path, please—for the sake of anyone following after you—document your journey. Community resources like these forums are pretty much all we have to go on.