three kernel patches for review

[Chris Pressey]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2005 07:56:18 +0200
Raphael Marmier <raphael at xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> That's interesting, but how do you know the location of the bad 
> addresses? Run memtest at boot?
> Run memtest manually and export a table of bad addresses to a file?
>
> As we are pushing further in the product life, more and more bits are 
> going to break. How do we handle that?

1. Suspect bad RAM.
2. Run e.g. memtest86 from its floppy.
3. Note locations of bad bits, if any.
4. Add those values to the vm.blacklist setting.
5. Repeat until there are too many bad bits to justify keeping the
   stick any more.

It would be great to have something even more convenient, like a RAM
test at boot time which automatically appends its findings to the
vm.blacklist.  That would be correspondingly more work to implement, of
course...

-Chris