3 ms·
No they are fundamentally rational. If some memory ended up making computers crash a lot and corrupt data because it regularly was flipping bits this would even
by ls612 4y ago
No they are fundamentally rational. If some memory ended up making computers crash a lot and corrupt data because it regularly was flipping bits this would eventually create a bad reputation and it would be avoided over time. Rowhammer uses fundamentally unnatural access patterns to flip bits which never occur outside of running the rowhammer test so the market places a rounds-to-zero value on mitigation. And despite that DDR5 is still much less vulnerable (although it’s unclear if that will change) to rowhammer despite higher clocks and densities.
- mort96 4y agoHow can it be fundamentally rational when you're making choices without critical pieces of information? And why are you discussing crashes? Rowhammer is usually considered a security vulnerability, not a general reliability issue, right? I'm confused by what you're trying to say.
- bcrl 4y agoECC deniers are quite difficult to understand. Once one has experienced an unreliable system with a few bad DRAM bits that caused data corruption, the 20% premium for ECC is well worth it. An hour of my time being wasted on debugging a wonky system more than pays for that.
- ls612 4y agoBecause economic rationality doesn’t require perfect information. And I’ve yet to see any practical rowhammer implementation in the wild which could target the browser.
- mort96 4y ago"Economic rationality doesn't require perfect information" may or may not be true in the general case. But if I want a system that's not vulnerable to rowhammer, and I'm buying new RAM sticks, the fact that I can't know whether a candidate RAM stick is vulnerable to rowhammer or not means I can't make rational choices, no?
- ls612 4y agomemtest86 absolutely can find rowhammer failures, but beyond that even if you specifically don’t know how to do that, others do and publish their findings and if some ram was really worse than others in a meaningful way here that information will be available as a noisy signal for ram purchase choices.
- saurik 4y agoMost people don't do that much critical stuff on their local computer, as all their critical data is stored by Google or Microsoft and they just transiently interact with it via web applications. What they do do on local computers that could be at all complicated is play games. The goal of a computer for the majority of users (aka, not us developers) is thereby to be as cheap as possible while being just stable enough to not fail so often as to be too annoying, while preferably being as fast as possible under highly constrained conditions to play games at high quality.