Messages in this thread | | | From | Rick van Rein <> | Subject | Patch: BadRAM put to use | Date | Fri, 24 Mar 2000 10:21:03 +0100 (CET) |
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Hello!
My computer currently runs smoothly with two DIMMs that were considered dead, just because they suffered from static discharge. A RAM checker told me what sections of the RAMs were indeed dead, and all the rest could be exploited.
I can use 61 MB out of 64 MB, which is a great result, and good for trees. My main concern regarding trees is not reuse of RAM that suffered from static electricity, but to be able to use RAM in spite of manufacturing errors; a very large portion of RAMs (95% of the production?) must now be discarded of due to such errors. Trees don't like that. Neither do I.
The patch (for Linux kernel 2.2.14) to make this all possible can be found at http://home.zonnet.nl/vanrein/badram/ and is a rather minimalistic solution. It's my first kernal patch, so I value your feedback (please send it Cc. to vanrein@zonnet.nl).
There are some issues on which I would like to hear your comments:
* Can anybody test on non-i386? I cannot, so I didn't attempt to write the arch-specific code yet. However, it seems straightforward to do, so let me know if you can test (with broken RAM) and I'll send you code.
* Is it worth the extra kernel code to exploit even more RAM by, say, allocating slabs around the bugs? For 32-bytes slabs [i386], that would mean that 63.976563MB out of 64MB can be used! This additional code would have to be a kernel compilation option ("Optimize for BadRAM"), only compiled-in for people that run on BadRAMs.
* If this patch is considered useful, how do I submit it to the kernel? Should there [also] be a 2.3.x patch?
* Would "BulletRAM" (RAM with bullet holes) be a nicer name? It'd mean that Linux becomes bullet-proof with this patch ;-) It's also more of a marketing term for hardware manufacturers...
Let me hear your thoughts!
Enjoy, -Rick van Rein.
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