Yeah, it's actually worse than that. Anyone trying to access DRAM on this hardware rev needs to be aware of the problem. Whether or not they use [] in that part

Yeah, it's actually worse than that. Anyone trying to access DRAM on this hardware rev needs to be aware of the problem. Whether or not they use [] in that particular code they need to know that memory accesses will bite them. They also need to make sure that their data structures are byte aligned with the memory boundary, or they're going to have impossible to debug bugs. Especially since the debugger has no way to know that DRAM is wired funny, so you can't trust it's output. There were really no clean ways to deal with this hardware compromise. Avoiding [] to Leave some bread crumbs around is maybe an ok solution. But there are bigger breadcrumbs around, like the malloc() implementation that is needed for this hardware.