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To: Branson Matheson <branson@dvals1.larc.nasa.gov>
cc: pechter@stars.sed.monmouth.army.mil (william pechter ILEX),
        FreeBSD-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: 940804 (vaporware ;-) reboots the system either: 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 13 Apr 95 11:28:27 EDT."
             <199504131528.LAA26412@dvals1.larc.nasa.gov> 
From: David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM>
Reply-To: davidg@Root.COM
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 08:35:33 -0700
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

>> >    The memory test was removed because it took too long on machines with a
>> > lot of memory (a lot is >= 64MB) and wasn't effective in finding real memory
>> > problems anyway.
>> 
>> Well, it fixed my wife's OS/2 installation crash problem and her 
>> Linux sig 11's.  Turned out to be bad memory.
>
>
> I would like to see this left in the system as an option to configure into
> the kernel... we could even add a hack to it so that the check can be a bit 
> more visiable... like the /|\- thingy or even the dots across the screen.
> mabey a count out of the memeory... and possibly a generated report when it
> finds a bad part... If there is interest in this... I will clean-up
> the code I have and add some of the other features mentioned above.. for 
> now I have the dots. 

   I don't want memory test code in the kernel, but it might be nice to have
it in our /boot when we implement it.
   The problem with this of course is that it leads people to a false sense of
confidence. Many memory problems require hours of testing before they show up.
There are already many good memory test programs out there for PCs that do a
much more credible job than we could ever do as part of a bootstrap.

-DG