Out of memory while booting?

Jim Kuzdrall gnhlug at intrel.com
Fri Apr 3 08:08:28 EDT 2009


On Wednesday 01 April 2009 12:59, Charles G Montgomery wrote:
> If anyone has an idea what the problem might be, or just suggestions
> of things to test, that would be greatly appreciated.

    A "stuck" (burned out) memory line driver would behave like that if 
it affected the upper address lines.  In that case, data sent to a 
higher address would just overwrite data at a lower address.  The line 
drivers used to be 8 or 16 bits wide.  What you are observing may not 
be a genuine out-of-memory detection, but an overwrite of the parameter 
table with data intended for elsewhere.

    Perhaps memtest86 doesn't look for errors of that sort.  I don't 
know if Linux has an equivalent of BASIC's POKE and PEEK.  If it does, 
erase a data word in high memory; set a word in low memory; see if the 
word high memory changed.  This must be done for every pair of memory 
lines.  But I suspect memtest86 does this; it is easy enough.

    It should not be necessary to run a test for more than one complete 
scan of the memory.  This problem appears every time.  It is a hard 
error, not an intermittent error.

    You might try to boot DSL (Damn Small Linux) which only requires 
16MB of RAM.

    Things have changed a lot since I designed computers, but perhaps 
this insight will lead to a solution.  Please report what you 
eventually find.

Jim Kuzdrall


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