Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:37:07 -0500 (EST) | From | "Richard B. Johnson" <> | Subject | Re: Memory Trauam |
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On Wed, 20 Nov 1996, Kenneth Albanowski wrote:
> > On Tue, 19 Nov 1996, Richard B. Johnson wrote: > > > One thing is certainly true. Power-on-self-test and check-memory routines > > are just for "show". You could lean a lot more by seeing if the system > > boots and can then do something useful for several days. > > Hmm. Odd idea here: how difficult would it be to create a deamon that sits > in the background, mmaps in physical pages sequentially, and performs > memory tests on them? Obviously you couldn't test any owned or kernel > memory this way, but you could run the thing on low priority all the time. > > -- > Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126) > > I did something sorta like that to test my new Pentium 166 with the Intel chip. I made a simple program that declared a local 2048 byte buffer (on the stack). It forked a child, then wrote (forever) random numbers to the buffer. Of course the child did this too as did its child, etc. When the forked failed, I allowed the children to kill each other until everything unwound to the original parent. This could continue forever.
Seeing that this worked okay, I had each child write a buffer of data to a different file then close. The result was a machine that exercised about everything except networking code. After about a day without any crashes, I felt that the machine (this machine) was solid.
Cheers, Dick Johnson -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Richard B. Johnson Project Engineer Analogic Corporation Voice : (508) 977-3000 ext. 3754 Fax : (508) 532-6097 Modem : (508) 977-6870 Ftp : ftp@boneserver.analogic.com Email : rjohnson@analogic.com, johnson@analogic.com Penguin : Linux version 2.1.11 on an i586 machine. Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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