21 November 2007
- add a startup check for amount of memory being greater than the possible
address space; prevents user confusion on 32-bit systems that use addressing
tricks to have >4GB total system memory. Thanks: Michael Kelly.
- documentation updates
-fix a bug in the align-to-page logic which may have prevented memtester
from mlock()ing the memory it was trying to test on some systems.
Thanks: Baif Chen.
- test algorithm improvement: the walking 0 bits test was only
walking the 0 bit in one direction, instead of walking it up
and back down the line the way it was intended to. Thanks: Tim
Rule.
- formatting cleanups.
-change to the method of allocating and locking memory; if we get EPERM
when trying to mlock(), reset the amount of memory desired to the original
amount and try again without mlock(). The reason for this is that on many
systems, mlock() won't return EPERM until after having returned ENOMEM for
a larger amount. The new behaviour allows processes without mlock privileges
to still test the fully-specified amount or as much memory as can be
allocated. Thanks for the suggestion and testing to Dan Bradley.
-make memtester's exit code meaningful. See the manpage for its meaning.
Thanks to Wurzel Parsons-Keir, who sent a patch for the code, so I only had
to document it.
-small changes to enable building with dietlibc and a few other environments
that don't even attempt to provide the various Posix definitions.
-cosmetic fixes to output.
-restore the reduce-and-retry loop of memory locking from version 2.
The version 4 rewrite was mainly to accomplish three things:
(1) the previous code was basically a hack, and was ugly.
(2) to make the code more portable. The previous version required some
hackery to compile on some systems.
(3) to make the code fully 64-bit aware. The previous version worked
on 64-bit systems, but did not fully stress the memory subsystems
on them -- this version should be better at stress-testing 64-bit
systems.
pkgsrc changes:
* Use the gzipped tarball (the bzipped one is no more).
* Tweak COMMENT.
* GNU make is no longer needed.
<pancake at phreaker.net> with some minor changes by me.
memtest is a utility for testing the memory subsystem in a computer
to determine if it is faulty. The original source was by Simon
Kirby <sim@stormix.com>. I have by this time completely rewritten
the original source, and added many additional tests to help catch
borderline memory. I also rewrote the original tests (which catch
mainly memory bits which are stuck permanently high or low) so that
they run approximately an order of magnitude faster.
