Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
On Friday 14 November 2008, Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> wrote about 'Re: Lenny, apt(titude), dependency issues, seg faults and corrupted .DEB packages':On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 05:10:35PM -0600, "Boyd Stephen Smith Jr."<bss03@volumehost.net> was heard to say:On Friday 14 November 2008, "Jeff Soules" <soules@gmail.com> wrote about 'Re: Lenny, apt(titude), dependency issues, seg faults and corrupted .DEB packages':Memtest86+ is a GPL'd memory testing suite that should work with anything in the i386-amd64 family.Yeah, but it's not actually that good at testing memory.Do you have a reference for that?Nope. I also can't find one after a bit of googling. I seem to remember that there were two or 3 people on gentoo-user that were able to find memory errors with a perl script that memtest86 couldn't find. Perhaps those were actually CPU errors with similar symptoms.I could be remembering it wrong. I'll cease deriding memtest86 until I see problems again and document them properly.
MS's memory tester is pretty terrible IMO, but the memtests are a little better. At least, I was able to find errors with memtest86+ that MS didn't find. (Could have been false positives of some kind, I suppose.) One must always remember to use the latest version, sometimes the newer CPUs and chipsets aren't supported properly and there can be very subtle bugs.
Anything is better than nothing at all, maybe. Mark Allums, weasel-worder of the year