Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

therecord.media

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 127 posts

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#61

Post by staticassertion »

vbezhenar wrote: post #47
notriddle wrote: post #9

In other words, blame Intel for trying to pass off ECC as a "Enterprise Feature" instead of the basic necessity that it is.

Do you think many Ryzen PCs use ECC? I doubt that. It's accepted truth among gamers and power users, that ECC is waste of budget. I don't share this position, but if you'd ask on some computer forums, that's what you'll hear. If ECC would be enabled on all Intel CPUs, nothing fundamentally would change, most users would prefer to save 10% on their RAM.

The price of ECC is artificially inflated because it's not available to consumers.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#62

Post by staticassertion »

nightfly wrote: post #50
creato wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM manufacturers continue (knowingly at this point) to manufacture faulty products, and we should blame Intel?

How many times more expensive would DRAM that is immune to rowhammer cost?

Not an expert, but I feel like the answer is not much. ECC RAM is not, to my knowledge, considerably more expensive to produce - the reason it costs more is because it only works with specific devices, so it's more of a market cost.

ECC RAM is pretty effective as-is against rowhammer, and imo you could very likely tweak ECC's approach to get even further.

The 'worst case' solution wouldn't be more than 2x, right? Since you'd just have to keep a clone of RAM, but obviously shuffled so that the same errors wouldn't occur in the same places. So 2x seems like the sort of absurd upper bound, but I feel like we could do a lot better.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#63

Post by userbinator »

gugagore wrote: post #25
creato wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM manufacturers continue (knowingly at this point) to manufacture faulty products, and we should blame Intel?

I am not familiar with DRAM spec sheets, but are manufacturers specifying that there will be zero errors? Without a specification that says so, I don't think it's necessarily the fault of the manufacturer if they cannot build perfect RAM! Suppose someone builds a car with one these computers in a safety-critical role, and then someone gets injured because of an error that "originated" with the RAM.

The true safety-critical stuff is far from ordinary and would never use commodity DRAM.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#64

Post by userbinator »

nightfly wrote: post #50
creato wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM manufacturers continue (knowingly at this point) to manufacture faulty products, and we should blame Intel?

How many times more expensive would DRAM that is immune to rowhammer cost?

Mid 2008 or so I think was when rowhammer-prone DRAM started appearing, so consider the density of that DRAM compared to today.

Re: Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

#65

Post by userbinator »

notriddle wrote: post #28
creato wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM manufacturers continue (knowingly at this point) to manufacture faulty products, and we should blame Intel?

Yes. Intel is an industry leader. EFI, Thunderbolt, and the "ultrabook" product category are all their ideas. By adding a feature to their CPU products, they induce demand for anything that complements it. By putting ECC support into their highest-end mobile CPUs only, they made them into high-end luxuries instead of industry standard. https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search/featurefi...

As others have mentioned, ECC is nothing more than a bandaid for what is ultimately a defective product.
Post reply on HN