Uwe Kleine-König wrote: > With the latter you have a test case to determine if your > RAM is bad (or not). With the memtest kernel option memory is tested > before it's given out to kmalloc. So it is able in some cases to just > not give out bad parts of RAM allowing to use RAM that is a bit broken.
That would be fun. Alas, the code just seems to run a memory test at boot time (not at kmalloc-time) and reserve areas that do not pass so they don't get used during the corresponding run of the kernel. > Having said that I don't know if it's sensible to add to Debian as I > didn't test runtime and binary size overhead. No opinion on that from me. It does seem a shame that many kinds of faults would be likely to be missed: http://www.memtest86.com/tech.html#philo That seems like the bigger potential cost. When someone runs into corruption that the memtest option did not catch, what can we say to such a person? (It would be easier if there were a manpage for kernel parameters and a culture such that everyone read it before enabling them.) I should have just been quiet. :) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org