Do any tools like say Memtest86 use test patterns that will detect row hammer vulnerability and for that matter, is it something that can be fixed on any given system by changing the RAS/CAS frequency or the voltage?
Many years ago, I ran a couple of PC shops. When EDO RAM first came out we had a lot of problems with random crashes being reported by customers, usually when they were running Word. We would typically run memory tests for a few hours in QAFE, which was then the best at detecting errors, but it would consistently fail to find anything wrong with these systems.
It turned out that the most reliable way to reproduce the problem was to run the shareware version of Duke Nukem. So we had a copy of it on all our diagnostic disks. If a system could get through the first level without any on-screen corruption, you knew it wasn't going to come back to the shop, so that became a standard test on all new PCs.
You made me remember a extremely interesting article about Guild Wars team... they were annoyed with the amount of weird bug reports, and one of their programmers found out how to make the game self-analyze its data, and find if it was RAM hardware issue, he found out that about 1% of all their players had computers with faulty RAM, and a good amount of bug reports came from these computers, and that this program saved them a lot of money (since now they didn't needed to make devs chase "ghost" bugs, only actually real bugs).
I had bad RAM on my primary Linux desktop some ~six years ago and it caused an endless series of problems, data corruption, and hard reboots every few months. It happened so infrequently that I never quite tracked it down, but I'd copied hundreds of gigabytes of data between computers over my LAN and lots of random files still have some corrupted bits in them to this day from that.
I finally got serious about tracking down the issue, ran memtest, and sure enough, it discovered a faulty DIMM pretty quickly. I yanked it out and the problems immediately went away.
Memtest86's rowhammer test is pretty reliable. In fact, since the test's inclusion, so many Rowhammer-related errors have been observed that the developers of Memtest86 split the test into two passes (a high-frequency hammer test and a lower-frequency, rate-limited hammer test) due to the sheer number of users failing the high-frequency Rowhammer pass. [1]
I guess the number of "enthusiasts" running Memtest on their (or their acquaintances') PCs still is miniscule. So in my opinion no one would notice, except if a return questionnaire explicitly included a
[√] error while using memtest
field. Keep in mind that newer versions of Microsoft's Windows include their own memory tester. Most people will, if at all, use this.
Many years ago, I ran a couple of PC shops. When EDO RAM first came out we had a lot of problems with random crashes being reported by customers, usually when they were running Word. We would typically run memory tests for a few hours in QAFE, which was then the best at detecting errors, but it would consistently fail to find anything wrong with these systems.
It turned out that the most reliable way to reproduce the problem was to run the shareware version of Duke Nukem. So we had a copy of it on all our diagnostic disks. If a system could get through the first level without any on-screen corruption, you knew it wasn't going to come back to the shop, so that became a standard test on all new PCs.