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Wed Oct  3 10:53:19 UTC 2012 - cs@linux-administrator.com

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- update to release 4.0s 

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Sun Apr 17 10:52:04 UTC 2011 - cs@linux-administrator.com

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- update to release 4.0

    * Support for testing with multiple CPUs. All tests except

      for #11 (Bit Fade) have been multi-threaded.

      A maximum of 16 CPUs will be used for testing.

    * CPU detection has been completely re-written to use the

      brand ID string rather than the cumbersome, difficult to

      maintain and often out of date CPUID family information.

      All new processors will now be correctly identified without

      requiring code support.

    * All code related to controller identification, PCI and DMI

      has been removed. This may be a controversial decision and

      was not made lightly. The following are justifications

      for the decision:

      1. Controller identification has nothing to do with actual

         testing of memory, the core purpose of Memtest86.

      2. This code needed to be updated with every new chipset.

         With the ever growing number of chipsets it is not

         possible to keep up with the changes. The result is that

         new chipsets were more often than not reported in-correctly.

         In the authors opinion incorrect information

         is worse than no information.

      3. Probing for chipset information carries the risk of

         making the program crash.

      4. The amount of code involved with controller identification

         was quite large, making support more difficult.

      Removing this code also had the unfortunate effect of removing

      reporting of correctable ECC errors. The code to support ECC

      was hopelessly intertwined the controller identification code.

      A fresh, streamlined implementation of ECC reporting is planned

      for a future release.

    * A surprising number of conditions existed that potentially cause

      problems when testing more than 4 GB of memory. Most if not all

      of these conditions have been identified and corrected.

    * A number of cases were corrected where not all of memory was

      being tested. For most tests the last word of each test block

      was not tested. In addition an error in the paging code was

      fixed that omitted from testing the last 256 bytes of each

      block above 2 GB.

    * The information display has been simplified and a number of

      details that were not relevant to testing were removed.

    * Memory speed measurement has been parallelized for more accurate

      reporting for multi channel memory controllers.

    * This is a major re-write of the Memtest86 with a large number of

      minor bug-fixes and substantial cleanup and

      re-organization of the code.  

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