Hector Martin

@jonmasters made a good point that the lack of communication between SW and HW is a cause of the security problem. Understanding why the decision was made is probably a good idea, rather than assuming incompetence or idiocy. 2/N

Are DRAM designers morons for allowing rowhammer? That hasn’t been solved, whereas Meltdown has. The only solution I’ve heard for rowhammer is “let’s make DRAM way more expensive”. The future isn’t SW or HW, it’s systems architecture spanning both and less tribalism! N/N

Rowhammer is Intel's fault too: they're largely the reason why desktop systems do not use ECC memory (because they market it as premium). It is utter insanity that at current DRAM densities we pretend memory is flawless. Every other storage tech has used ECC for decades.

(I know ECC as it exists today for DRAM does not completely mitigate rowhammer, but it certainly helps a lot)

Rowhammer has been solved, BTW. There are algorithms that can be used to proactively refresh vulnerable rows. Combined with faster refresh intervals, it's an effective mitigation.

if you mean TRR, then, that is trivial to bypass (we did early this year) we even bypassed it while running with doubled refresh rate... so, maybe it is solved, but not the way you describe here ;)

Yeah I am not sure how we solve rowhammer within current economic constraints. Memory controller is probably the best place to do it.

Exactly what I've been talking about in quite a few of my talks this year: Rowhammer is an optimization problem. Similar for other HW/SW issues. We want computers to be fast, cheap, and reliable at the same time. Naturally we must run into edge cases from time to time.