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File memtest86.changes of Package memtest86 (Revision 6)

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

- 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      maintain and often out of date CPUID family information.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.