Software workaround for corrupted RAM in OS X

Recently my computer has been acting up. Software started crashing, compilations failing, etc. Many small errors that I could not replicate. I wasn't too concerned, because I'm a natural tinkerer - I play with software, install many different additions and one of the side effects can be an unstable operating system. Eventually my system stopped booting - the partition table was corrupted. I had to wipe it and reinstall (which was a massive pain in the ass). I also tried to run some hardware checks just in case (the computer is over three years old), but the "Apple Hardware Test" was hanging each time I run (bad sign huh?). I'v eventually run memtest86 overnight and discovered that part of my RAM is corrupted. My computer is a Mac Book Pro Retina with expired warranty.

Normally I would buy new ram and install it myself, but the retina MBPs have RAM permanently soldered to the logic board. Instead of paying through the nose to get it fixed I researched software solutions. Linux users have a very handy kernel option that will tell the OS not to use a particular range of memory addresses - it's called memap. Situation on OS X is not so rosy. The only option available is to restrict memory up to the point where it's corrupted (but this way you lose everything after it). In my case I had around 60Mb range of corrupted memory in the 13th gigabyte. My only option was to restrict the system to use 12Gb. This is the procedure:

1. Run memtest86 overnight to figure where your memory is corrupted.
2. Estimate the lowest range of usable memory (in my case it was 12000Mb).
3. Restrict the memory by setting a kernel flag: 

    sudo nvram boot-args="maxmem=12000"

This did the trick and made my laptop usable again!