On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 01:38:14PM -0700, Jeff Johnson wrote:
Your other options are a benchtop DIMM tester (very expensive, several grand) or using a hardware only PCI test card from Ultra-X.
The problem I've found, and why of the numerous memory problems, only one was caught by memtest is that the problem often isn't the memory device in isolation. This is especially true in light of the question in the subject which involves running a memory part out of spec. I do feel that memtest is a very useful tool. I had a machine that was corrupting files written to disk and occasionally crashing. memtest allowed me to quickly identify a stuck bit in a memory module and replace that memory. But, that's the only time I've ever had it find anything. My other problems have always been interaction problems. Also, with the Linux memory management system, a kernel compile will pretty fully exercise at least a couple of GB of memory. Agreed, not all problems will be caught or noticeable, but since gcc builds a lot of data structures with pointers, bad memory tends to cause segfaults which show up fairly readily. David -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
