Comment on The right FUCKING time to get TWO ram sticks damaged
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 4 days agowow i’m running linux, so it might be perfect
though i’m a bit scared that it will get worse over time. Today i got a freeze that forced me to test the ram with memtest86, but since september i got some random corruption in the btrfs filesystem (luckily always “useless” files like flatpak or docker stuff that i could delete and download again in seconds) and i assumed it was a btrfs bug, not hardware problem
I had to do this on my busted ddr4 2 weeks ago. Badram didn’t work, but memmap did. I had to do bit flipping to get the translation from BADRAM as explained here.
I think the latest memtest86+ has the option to report in memmap format. But you will need to take a photo of the screen, coz it’s Foss and not as fancy as Passmarks memtest.
You can even make linux run an automatic memtest on boot and reserve the bad areas it finds. This is with the memtest=N kernel parameter, where N is the number of passes. memtest=17 tests all patterns. With this, the kernel will run an automatic test on every boot.
To add to what the above commenter said: afaik Grub allows specifying kernel parameters at boot by pressing some hotkey. You could type in the string from memtest86 if you find what the parameter should be called (or add the memtest parameter instead).
COASTER1921@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
If I were in this position I’d strongly consider using 16GB for the next year or two if you have a working stick. Especially with an NVME SSD, good swap performance makes the impact of running out of memory much smaller than it used to be.