memtester
                                       
  Utility to test for faulty memory subsystem.
  
    by Charles Cazabon <charlesc-memtester@pyropus.ca>
    
    Copyright 1999 Simon Kirby. 
    Version 2 Copyright © 1999 Charles Cazabon.
    Version 3 not publicly released.
    Version 4 rewrite:
    Copyright 2007 Charles Cazabon.
    Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 (only).
    See the file COPYING for details.


  About memtester
  
    memtester is a utility for testing the memory subsystem in a computer to
    determine if it is faulty. The original source was by Simon Kirby
    <sim@stormix.com>. I have by this time completely rewritten the
    original source, and added many additional tests to help catch
    borderline memory. I also rewrote the original tests (which catch
    mainly memory bits which are stuck permanently high or low) so that
    they run approximately an order of magnitude faster.
   
    The version 4 rewrite was mainly to accomplish three things:
   
    (1) the previous code was basically a hack, and was ugly.
    (2) to make the code more portable.  The previous version required some
        hackery to compile on some systems.
    (3) to make the code fully 64-bit aware.  The previous version worked
        on 64-bit systems, but did not fully stress the memory subsystems
        on them -- this version should be better at stress-testing 64-bit
        systems.
         
  Building memtester
  
    memtester is currently only distributed in source-code form. Building
    it, however, is simple -- just type `make`.  There's no `configure` script
    or anything like that.  If you have a really strange system/toolchain,
    you might need to edit the conf-cc or conf-ld files, but try to build it
    without changes first.
    
    I've successfully built and run memtester 4 on the following systems:

        HP Tru64 Unix 4.0g (Alpha)
        HP Tru64 Unix 5.1b (Alpha)
        HP-UX 11i 11.11 (PA-RISC)
        HP-UX 11i 11.23 (64-bit Itanium)
        Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (various)
        other 32-bit Linux (Mandrake, RedHat, etc) (various)
        RedHat Enterprise Linux (64-bit AMD Opteron)
        FreeBSD 4.9 (32-bit Intel)
        FreeBSD 5.1 (64-bit Alpha)
        NetBSD 1.6 (32-bit Intel)
        Darwin (OS X) 7.5.0 (32-bit PowerPC)

    It should, however, work on other Unix-like systems -- I simply don't
    have access to systems running Solaris, AIX, etc. at the moment.
    If you have trouble building memtester on your system, please report it
    to me so I can fix this.

  Using memtester
  
    Usage is simple.  As root, run the resulting memtester binary with the 
    following commandline:
    
    memtester <memory> [runs]
    
    where <memory> is the amount of memory to test, in megabytes.
    [runs] is an optional limit to the number of runs through all tests.
    
    memtester must run as user root so that it can lock its pages into 
    memory. If memtester fails to lock its pages, it will issue a warning and 
    continue regardless.
   
  Current Version
  
    The current version of memtester should be available at
    http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/
    
    Questions, comments, and feature requests should be
    directed to me at <charlesc-memtester@pyropus.ca>.  Read BUGS to report 
    bugs found in memtester.