Glenn McKechnie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > I got annoyed with memtest86 a while ago and started scratching itches.
> > 
> > I have a preliminary patch available that I will send to Chris Brady
> > as soon as I do as I sleep on it and can do a final review with
> > a fresh mind.
> > 
> > As of 2.9 memtest86 does BIOS calls to get the memory size, this
> > broke netbooting.
> 
> I could not get the 2.9 release (01/march/2002 from teresaudio.com) to
> work with the small memory machines here - 16 meg on 486's.
> 
> It would detect 640K of memory using the default MemMap of e801-Std and
> would then proceed to Testing: 88K - 1024K  552K     with errors occuring
> on test #4. I assume the errors because it was testing the "wrong" area?
> Resetting the Memory Sizing to Probe would hang the machine.
> 
> Using this newer version (memtest.2.9-eb1) resolves that problem. It
> detects 16M and proceeds to Testing: 96K - 16M 16M.
> Is this to do with the the MemMap detection change to e88-Std ?

Essentially correct.  The problem was 2.9 when network booted thought
it had performed the necessary BIOS calls but it had not, so it got
confused.  2.9-eb1 fixes that but almost as an after thought as I was
aiming at 64G support.  And it works for the normal set of tests on my
6G test machine.  

So 2.9 booted from a floppy should work fine for you. 

> However, restarting the test ( c => 8 ) will hang the machine.

Ouch.  

Problem I was performing BIOS calls after smashing the interrupt
table.  Ooops.

In init/main.c line 76 remove
v->firmware = FIRMWARE_UNKNOWN;

And then it will remember it already did the BIOS calls, and all
will be well.

The fact it actually worked sometimes is a mystery to me.
Under linuxbios I wasn't smashing the linuxbios table so it was o.k.
there.

> A quick check of 2.8 and these problems don't occur.
> Memtest 2.8 detected 16M and would test 76K - 16M under the default (Std)
> test.
> 
> Performing this on another machine (P120 - 48M) showed the same
> behaviour to the restarting problem  (only the NIC, with BootRom, was
> transferred over).
> MemMap e820-Std       Memory 48M      Testing: 96K - 48M  48M

Yep I have reproduced it here as well.

Eric

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