Re: Perform minimal RAM test at boot

Peter Steiner (p.steiner@t-online.de)
Mon, 1 Nov 1999 15:25:49 +0100 (CET)

> > > What about the attached code? It's for 2.3.20 but it should be easy to
> > > apply to other versions.
> >
> > Nice. But it my eyes it should panic, not try to mark pages reserved
> > and continue. If there's one error, there may be undetected errors
> > nearby. I'd suggest panic() and forcing user deal with that.

I'm not sure if this is really necessary.

> You're very right.
>
> GOOD memory tests find all errors that can be modelled.

This is *not* a memory test. It's a memory map veryfier. I wrote a good
memory test that uses special access patterns to stress test the whole
memory subsystem. It takes half an hour on my 64MB machine to complete.
That's to slow for a standard bootup. And I'm still not satisfied with it.

The memory map veryfier is designed to detect wrong "mem=xxx" parameters,
buggy BIOSses and memory holes (eg. from 15M to 16M). And it seems to work
reliably.

Peter

-- 
  _   x    ___   p.steiner@t-online.de (Peter Steiner)
 / \_/_\_ /,--'
 \/>'~~~~//
   \_____/ perl -e'while(<>){s/=\n//g;s/=([\dA-F]{2})/chr(hex($1))/eg;print;}'


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