[Discuss] Server won't boot kernel. initramfs problem?

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 12:22 PM, John Abreau <abreauj at gmail.com> wrote:
> RAM going bad silently is an aggravating problem, and we often don't think
> to test the RAM when some mysterious error crops up. It would be great if
> Nagios was able to test RAM automatically.
>
> Is it possible to test RAM on a live system, rather than having to boot
> into memtest86?

There is a user space memory tester that tries to use mlock() to avoid paging.

http://pyropus.ca/software/memtester/

Some obvious caveats would apply:

Kernel memory goes untested (whether code, data, or allocated to buffer caches).
Memory allocated to other processes only gets tested when they get paged out.
Since it is all virtual addresses,  a failure doesn't tell you where
the error occurred.
Likely to trash your system performance while it runs.

So chances are you probably don't want to use it....

Bill Bogstad