This is a RFC for the BadRAM feature originally developed by Rick van Rein. Patches are against vanilla 2.6.38. The idea is to allow the user to specify RAM addresses that shouldn't be touched by the OS, because they are broken in some way. Not all machines have hardware support for hwpoison, ECC RAM, etc, so here's a solution that allows to use bitmasks to mask address patterns with the new "badram" kernel command line parameter. Memtest86 has an option to generate these patterns since v2.3 so the only thing for the user to do should be: - run Memtest86 - note down the pattern - add badram=<pattern> to the kernel command line The concerning pages are then marked with the hwpoison flag and thus won't be used by the memory managment system. Link to Ricks original patches and docs: http://rick.vanrein.org/linux/badram/ Stefan Stefan Assmann (3): Add string parsing function get_next_ulong support for broken memory modules (BadRAM) Add documentation and credits for BadRAM CREDITS | 9 + Documentation/BadRAM.txt | 369 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt | 5 + include/linux/kernel.h | 1 + lib/cmdline.c | 35 ++++ mm/memory-failure.c | 95 +++++++++ 6 files changed, 514 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 Documentation/BadRAM.txt -- 1.7.4 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>