Le Lundi 8 Septembre 2003 16:58, Here is the reply from Rick van Rein Hello Pierre,
Rather than doing a mindless reply-to-all, I am sending this to you, the sender. If you think it fits on some list you were discussing this topic on, you are welcome to forward it. > > Is the badram patch going to be inserted in the kernel ? That could be > > interesting for people who cannot install because of defective ram > > sticks. I'd love to see it, but the patch has been out for quite some time and it is not being picked up by Linus and friends. I haven't really pushed it either, I stick to maintaining the patch page. Some distributions do include the patch at this time, namely Debian and (...) > > Apparently it does not affect kernel performance or > > compatibility in any case (to be tested though). WDYT ? This is indeed true. All that is done is avoid that defective pages are inserted in the free page pool at startup. The code is deleted after that has happened. And the patch is really, really small so loading it isn't going to be a problem, except perhaps on extreme systems (notably floppy- installed Linux). > This is a good idea. > memtest86 http://www.memtest86.com/ already included in Mdk 9.2 should be > installed by default. Moreover, it can be invoked as a kernel. Just tell LILO or Grub to load the image that would otherwise be written to a disk. I am not the author of memtest86 by the way, that's Chris Brady. > This program should be able to transmit easily the > defectives addresses to badram : http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/ Yep, and people from all over the world have reported success. I really see no reason to leave it out of any normal distro; all that I can see is that it is a `weird extension' and you could wonder if the kernel isn't getting overcrowded if that sort of stuff is let in. > I hope that the authors (in CC) have planned to do that ! It's all ready to be included: * memtest86 can be a boot kernel * the BadRAM patch is a kernel compilation option It should just be picked up, that's all. If Mandrake is interested to include it they are welcome to be the first mainstream Linux rebel :) Cheers, Rick van Rein. -- Pierre Jarillon - http://pjarillon.free.fr/ Vice-pr�sident de l'ABUL : http://abul.org/
