[OT] memtest86 (Was: Problems with AMD64 and 8 GB RAM?)

[David O'Brien]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 01:15:28AM -0500, Damian Gerow wrote:
> Thus spake Mike Hunter (mhunter at ack.Berkeley.EDU) [30/03/05 18:46]:
> : This reminds me, I noticed that gentoo includes a memtest86 "kernel" in
> : their install ISO.  Would this be a hard feature to include in FreeBSD?
> 
> In the case of AMD64, it'd be almost pointless.  I've not yet been able to
> run a copy of memtest86 on my machine (though it could have been due to
> memory problems at the time).
> 
> memtest86+ (http://www.memtest.org/) works great, though.  It's a fork
> from memtest86.

FEH!  memtest86+ can be crap.  Version 1.30 had a very bad bug where it
would report all memory above 4GB on Opteron systems as bad.  I replaced
a motherboard and a complete set of 8x1GB DIMM's because of it.  Very
unfortunately for me 1.30 was the latest version when FreeBSD/amd64 had
the busdma bug that would corrumpt data.  (thus why I was bothering to
test my memory).  Anyone using memtest86+ on AMD64 should make sure they
have version 1.40.

memtest86 (the original) versions below 3.2 had fatal bugs on AMD64 CPU's
also.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)