Re:Once thought safe, DDR4 memory shown to be vulnerable to ...
by nkurz on Friday March 18, 2016 @02:27AM
(#11310269)
The memory can recover one, detect two, and will throw up loud warning bells to any competent admin as long as it is doing so.
I don't have personal experience here, but one of the important claims in the paper is that this warning is not given on all servers:
Unfortunately, server vendors routinely use a technique
called ECC threshold or the 'leaky bucket' algorithm where
they count ECC errors for a period of time and report them
only if they reach certain levels of failure. From what we
understand, this threshold is commonly above 100 per hour,
but this remains a trade secret and varies based on the
server vendor. So, to see ECC errors (MCE in Linux or
WHEA in Windows), there generally needs to be 100 bit flips
per hour or greater. This makes “seeing” Rowhammer on
server error logs more difficult.
In addition, we have observed some server vendors will
NEVER report ECC events back to the OS,although they might
get logged into IPMI. Typically, users expect to see
correctable ECC errors logged directly to the OS or that
halt the system when they cannot be corrected. During our
investigation into this phenomenon, we even encountered one
server that neither reported ECC events to the OS nor
halted when bit flips were not correctable. The end result
was data corruption at the application level.
This is something, in our opinion, that should never happen
on an ECC protected server system.
Re:Once thought safe, DDR4 memory shown to be vulnerable to ...
by baruch on Friday March 18, 2016 @03:02AM
(#11310347)
On the servers that I use the server will log to ipmi sel only after a threshold but the Linux OS will get an MCE for each error so a monitoring tool can detect and alert even before the BIOS logs anything.
Re:Once thought safe, DDR4 memory shown to be vulnerable to ...
by BuildTheRobots on Friday March 18, 2016 @08:12AM
(#11311216)
I really wish they'd have expanded on that somewhere and actually stated what manufacturers/models of server they tested and which ones don't report ECC errors.
Even when trying to trigger rowhammer, the graph of bit flips is going to look like a logarithmic curve - Single-bit flips will be common, two-bits will be rare, and undetected flips will be real but ultimately not much to talk about compared to the discovered flips. You know they're there by the unrecoverable rate, and you replace the ram, discard any replicated data on that machine, and move on.