Re: [PATCH 2.6.24] mm: BadRAM support for broken memory

Ingo Molnar
2008-03-04T14:07:00Z

* Rick van Rein <rick@vanrein.org> wrote:

> > as i said it in another reply to this thread, it would be perfectly
> > acceptable for upstream to merge an easier to use boot option - be
> > that badmem=addr$size or excludemem=addr$size.
>
> I'm not sure if that is an optimal replacement of BadRAM at all.
>
> Broken memories usually manifest themselves as a column or row in a
> DIMM that stopped working. So there is a pattern in the memory that
> is to be excluded, and I'm not wholly sure that combines well with the
> excludemem mechanism. (I will look into it to be sure.) I hope to
> know after the weekend if the patterns that I am talking about can be
> turned into to a cosmetic boot option.

feel free to extend the "excludemem=" mechanism to support the full
range of "badram=" configuration methods. As long as you are able to
feed it into an e820 table (which is not trivial at all), it's the right
thing to do and it would be mainstream acceptable.

and i wouldnt mind the "badmem=" option either - because you already
have users of that facility and it's intuitively named as well - as long
as it's cleanly fed into the e820 space. I.e. it would all look and
behave the same way towards users as the BadMem patch does - with a
different internal approach.

Ingo