Linus Torvalds accuses Intel of throttling ECC memory and praises AMD for its support

“Intel has hurt the entire industry and users because of its bad and flawed ECC policies. Jokes aside , ”writes Torvalds. ECC support is not only about the stability of computers, although it is also important, even if failures due to errors in the operation of memory modules are very rare. Memory manufacturers have been trying to mitigate the memory hacking threat known as Rowhammer for over a decade.

ECC memory would easily solve the Rowhammer problem, but Intel long ago stopped supporting ECC memory on consumer platforms. Rowhammer attack refers to side-channel attacks. The cracker writes data to the selected memory cells with such intensity that the data changes in the cells adjacent to them. Thus, it is possible to attack the unprotected memory area and change the data in the protected area. Recent research has shown that continuous improvement in memory specifications has never been able to solve this problem, which ECC mechanisms could easily deal with.