DRAM refresh occurs regularly and automatically, think of it as signal regeneration. But this does not correct bit flips, even on ECC memory.
For ECC memory systems your idea is called ECC scrub. The idea is to trigger SBE correction before more bit flips occur, turning it into an unrecoverable or undetectable error. Usually it appears in BIOS as Patrol Scrub (continuously and slowly walk through all memory, slow enough not to contend with active programs) and Demand Scrub. See also https://github.com/andikleen/mcelog
I've never seen a reason for Demand Scrub until now... If the kernel talked to the memory controller to map which pages were which banks it could cause a scrub specific high risk pages (e.g. the kernel as you say) or after X uncached accesses... Or it might be possible to segregate less trusted code to specific bank groups.
Another approach might be to use memory integrity. Intel SGX has memory encryption and uses a tree of hashes to validate. It has holes against an on-machine attacker, but would defend against bit flips. https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/204.pdf
For ECC memory systems your idea is called ECC scrub. The idea is to trigger SBE correction before more bit flips occur, turning it into an unrecoverable or undetectable error. Usually it appears in BIOS as Patrol Scrub (continuously and slowly walk through all memory, slow enough not to contend with active programs) and Demand Scrub. See also https://github.com/andikleen/mcelog
I've never seen a reason for Demand Scrub until now... If the kernel talked to the memory controller to map which pages were which banks it could cause a scrub specific high risk pages (e.g. the kernel as you say) or after X uncached accesses... Or it might be possible to segregate less trusted code to specific bank groups.
https://lackingrhoticity.blogspot.com/2015/05/how-physical-a...
Another approach might be to use memory integrity. Intel SGX has memory encryption and uses a tree of hashes to validate. It has holes against an on-machine attacker, but would defend against bit flips. https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/204.pdf