[ale] Bad memory, need to work around it

[Jim Kinney]

http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 11:02 AM, Michael Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> Hello.
>
> We've had a lot of power spikes, interruptions, and so forth here.  It
> has taken a toll on my system, and memory is starting to go bad.
> However, it's a very, very small range; like 4K, that has bad bits in
> it. I'd like to work around it.
>
> I was doing some looking up and (don't have the link handy) someone
> out there said that adding "memmap=SIZE$START" would do the trick, and
> that the system would add that to the e820 map as reserved and that'd
> be that.  Not so simple, it seems, because when I do that I get an
> "early panic" message from the kernel, and it refuses to boot.
>
> memtest86 reports single-bit errors in the memory at 0x10f8a900
> through 0x10f8a9fff (probably about 30 addresses in there).  All of
> them are bad on the same bit; (contents & 00000100) is always equal to
> 00000100 on those bad bytes.
>
> Is there some way that I can get the Linux kernel to disregard that
> area of memory?  I don't want to go buy 4 GB of RAM just because 4K of
> my current RAM is unusable.  If the problem worsens over time (as I
> expect it will) then I'll replace it later.  But I don't want to
> replace it until the pain of working around bad memory is worse then
> spending the money on the RAM, since things are pretty tight at the
> moment...
>
>    - Mike
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky*
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