One extra consideration for this whole proposal ... Is the "physical address" a stable enough representation of the location of the faulty memory cells? On high end systems I can see a number of ways where the mapping from cells to physical address may change across reboot: 1) System support redundant memory (rank sparing or mirroring) 2) BIOS self test removes some memory from use 3) A multi-node system elects a different node to be boot-meister, which results in reshuffling of the address map. If any of these can happen: then it doesn't matter whether we have a list of addresses, or a pattern that expands to a list of addresses. We'll still mark some innocent memory as bad, and allow some known bad memory to be used - because our "addresses" no longer correspond to the bad memory cells. -Tony -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. 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>