Package: kernel-patch-badram Version: 2.6.12.0-1 Severity: important
I just added 2GB of RAM to my system (for a total of 3GB), and memtest86 reports that I have a bad region of memory. The badram pattern suggested by memtest86 is 0x5c8e400c,0xfffffffc. I do plan on exchanging these bad DIMMs for good ones, but I can't do that for a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd just work around the problem for now. After patching my kernel and rebooting, I checked the Memory line in the dmesg output as suggested by the documentation. It reported 0k space used by badram. I figured since the bad region was only four bytes, perhaps it was just rounding down. To be sure, I changed the mask to 0xfffff000, to mark 4KiB, a full page, as bad. But the kernel still reported 0k badram. I tried using a mask of 0xffff0000 to mark 64KiB, 16 full pages, as bad. Still 0k badram, but I did notice another change: The reported available memory decreased by 16MiB! Looking back at my previous attempts, and also comparing to the results when I used no badram parameter, I found that the reported available memory did not change until I use the larger mask. It appears that either badram is not working or, perhaps, that the memory display calculated by the badram patch is incorrect. I'm not sure how to tell which is the case, hence my decision to mark this bug "important", on the grounds that the patch may not be excluding my bad memory from the pool available for allocation. Here's a list of the results I got with various badram configs: no badram option Memory: 3114472k/3145408k available (1616k kernel code, 29756k reserved, 728k data, 172k init, 2227904k highmem, 0k BadRAM) Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda1 ro badram= 0x5c8e400c,0xfffffffc Memory: 3114472k/3145408k available (1616k kernel code, 29756k reserved, 728k data, 172k init, 2227904k highmem, 0k BadRAM) Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda1 ro badram=0x5c8e400c,0xfffff000 Memory: 3114472k/3145408k available (1616k kernel code, 29756k reserved, 728k data, 172k init, 2227904k highmem, 0k BadRAM) Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda1 ro badram=0x5c8e400c,0xffff8000 Memory: 3114472k/3145408k available (1616k kernel code, 29756k reserved, 728k data, 172k init, 2227904k highmem, 0k BadRAM) Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda1 ro badram=0x5c8e400c,0xffff0000 Memory: 3098088k/3145408k available (1616k kernel code, 29756k reserved, 728k data, 172k init, 2227904k highmem, 0k BadRAM My kernel config is just a copy of the 2.6.11 AMD K8 package config, except with badram turned on, obviously. Thanks, Shawn -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.11badram Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Versions of packages kernel-patch-badram depends on: ii bash 3.0-16 The GNU Bourne Again SHell ii grep-dctrl 2.6.7 Grep Debian package information ii patch 2.5.9-2 Apply a diff file to an original kernel-patch-badram recommends no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]