[(borderline) OT]: memtest question

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 08/31/15 10:07, Quartz wrote:
>> I downloaded Passmark memtest..........
>
> You asked this question at the right time, I just had to deal with all 
> of this only last week.
>
>
> Here's the situation:
> The memory testing landscape is currently a big ol' pile of shit.
>
> memtest86+ has had only three updates in the past five years, with the 
> most recent (5.01) being in '13. It does not support UEFI booting 
> (crashes and random errors), native 64 bit (it uses a PAE hack), can't 
> really handle ddr4, and has never supported ECC ram or other options. 
> As far as anyone can tell the developer(s) dropped off the face of the 
> earth. Although a bootable ISO is available for download from the 
> website, it's NOT a hybrid ISO meaning it has to be burned to a 
> physical CD. All of the other files on the site are *just* the memtest 
> application binaries. If you want to put these on a bootable usb 
> stick, you'll have to, manually, format a stick yourself from the 
> ground up with your own bootloader and everything and then install the 
> memtest binary into that. The website offers a program to do this for 
> you but as you discovered it's a Windows EXE. Linux and Unix users are 
> expected to figure it out themselves. My best advice (if just burning 
> a CD isn't an option) is to find some Linux distro or utility live-cd 
> that offers a hybrid ISO or direct USB image that also comes with 
> memtest86+. I *think* the latest Ubuntu's come with 5.01. Gparted-Live 
> only has 4.x for some reason.
>
>
> PassMark is their own can of shit. Starting with version 5.x, they 
> completely dropped support for BIOS booting and went UEFI only, 
> ostensibly to provide a 'better experience' but really so that they 
> could sell a new thing that was closed source. Unfortunately, UEFI is 
> still half broken on a lot of hardware and their new program loads all 
> sorts of extra shit that requires extra hardware support accordingly, 
> so it fails/hangs/crashes about as often as not. Their USB image still 
> lets you boot into the old 4.x BIOS version, but as with memtest86+, 
> there's no support for new chipsets/64bit/ddr4/ecc/etc.
>
>
> Basically, you want to test a server that's a couple years old that 
> doesn't have UEFI? eat a dick. You want to test a new machine with the 
> latest chipset but it has a buggy UEFI? eat a dick. You want to do 
> pretty much anything other than testing a commodity desktop from five 
> years ago? eat a dick. Can you tell I'm bitter about all this?


Oh man, I haven't laughed this hard in months, maybe years. I agree w/ 
your assessment, I was hoping someone might have a magic bullet to save 
the day, but I guess not. Is the memtest86+ source available ? If so, 
maybe someone else (*not* you or me) will pick it up. It was/is a nice 
facility when it works. As it happens, my ongoing Passmark memtest 
v6.0.0 got unstuck & has proceeded into the 2nd pass, so I may be OK 
there ....


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

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	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
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