[simoncion]

> If it was easy they'd have done it.

Why? Something like 70->90% of the world's DRAM is produced by three companies that are very friendly to each other. It makes no business sense to fix problems that you know your peer companies will not fix... that's spending money that you absolutely do not have to.

If the business/economic theory doesn't sway you, look way back to what happened to ISP speeds and pricing when Google Fiber so much as credibly threatened to start providing service in an area served by a mono/duo/triopoly. Or -more recently- how SpaceX demonstrated that the defense-contractor-owned space launch companies had spend decades wasting enormous amounts of taxpayer money by refusing to do any significant amount of research into bringing the cost to launch down substantially. ISPs and the space launch companies had no peers that would spend the resources required to provide a better and/or cheaper service to their customers, so it made absolutely no sense for any one of them to spend resources to break the truce and make them all far less money in the long run.

[inigyou]

Isn't this a memory controller concern, anyway?

[simoncion]

I don't know. But I do strongly suspect that if rowhammer could be eliminated by a change in memory controller behavior, it would have been eliminated long ago.

[inigyou]

The memory controller is in charge of basically everything, because this reduces the cost of the memory chips themselves. It controls refresh cycles and which row is open. If there are memory chips that add an additional self-refresh upon detecting rowhammer, it's a hack and a layering violation.

There are memory chips with a separate, limited, built-in self-refresh capability which is used during sleep mode to allow the controller to power down.