Re: Testing RAM from userspace / question about memmap= arguments

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Fri Dec 21 2007 - 07:58:30 EST


On Tue 2007-12-18 17:06:24, Matthew Bloch wrote:
> Hi - I'm trying to come up with a way of thoroughly testing every byte
> of RAM from within Linux on amd64 (so that it can be automated better
> than using memtest86+), and came up with an idea which I'm not sure is
> supported or practical.
>
> The obvious problem with testing memory from user space is that you
> can't mlock all of it, so the best you can do is about three quarters,
> and hope that the rest of the memory is okay.
>
> In order to test all of the memory, I'd like to run the user-space
> memtester over two boots of the kernel.
>
> Say we have a 1024MB machine, the first boot I'd not specify any
> arguments and assume the kernel would start at the bottom of physical
> memory and work its way up, so that the kernel & working userspace would
> live at the bottom, and the rest would be testable from space.
>
> On the second boot, could I then specify:
>
> memmap=exact memmap=512M@512M memmap=512M@0

Actually, with kexec, you can probably doing without reboot.

Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/