Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices today despite mitigations

Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by arcticbull on Monday November 15, 2021 @05:08PM (#29233482)

I think on-chip ECC would mitigate this problem just as well as off-chip ECC. Off-chip ECC is meant to catch errors during transmission (i.e. 72 bits transmitted for 64 bit words), not necessarily just the ones that occur internal to the package.

I agree it's meant to counter limitations due to increased density, but it should catch this to an extent also as this error is induced on-package right, not during transmission. Or am I mistaken?

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by monocasa on Monday November 15, 2021 @09:57PM (#29236201)

I think the point the parent is making is that this ECC is already fixing errors. There's no redundancy because the redundancy is already consumed by the defective cells in the chip. Any additional flips such as through rowhammer have no extra redundancy to fall back on in the general case with DDR5's built-in ECC.

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Re:Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices toda... by arcticbull on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @12:17AM (#29237143)

Ah i see. I didn’t view the errors as additive. Thanks for the clarification!

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