On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 12:27:46AM -0400, Albert D. Cahalan wrote: > > The x86 world has a stand-alone memory test program called > memtest86 that boots from a floppy. This is great, because it > can test all the memory in the system. It's only a few kB in > size, and can move itself about as needed. It uses direct VGA > text memory access for output.
nothing like this exists for powerpc. you would have to write such a thing in Forth ideally, then you would load it directly from OpenFirmware. i could be a C program too i suppose. > So now I have a Mac with some bad memory, and... what do I do? replace it. > MacOS seems to test memory at boot, but doesn't reliably find > a problem. Maybe 15% of the time I get an error message. macos, do something reliable? heh > Any hope of a stand-alone program that would take advantage of > the various PowerPC features (cache control & AltiVec prefetch) > to find memory problems? sounds like you just volunteered to write one ;-) there are some userland memory testers for GNU/Linux, you can boot them instead of init but they still are rather limited in how much of the memory they can test since the kernel gets in the way. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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