memtest86, the quintessential memory tester app, requires physical
console access and a reboot. In the meantime, I've run some tests on
geoffrin from within Linux with a program called 'memtester' which was
recommended to me:
http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/memtester/
It only seemed willing to lock about 2 gigs at a time, so I ran two
memtester processes, which between them covered most of the available
memory. I didn't tell it to test _all_ memory as I was afraid Linux
might start killing sshd processes for daring to ask for more memory to
send me the results. ;)
Well, it's spewing out errors right and left; 19 failures caught
between all the tests on the first pass. At this point we can't be sure
if these are actual physical RAM defects, or artifacts of kernel bugs
or other problems (or even bugs in memtester, which might not have been
thoroughly tested on amd64), but it's not a good sign.
I'll post the logs once it's run a while longer.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)