With many chipsets, MemTest86 allows counting of failures even in error-correcting ECC DRAM (without special handling, error correcting memory circuits can mask problems with the underlying memory chips). MemTest86(+)'s testing is very comprehensive, so it can find otherwise hidden problems on machines that appear to work normally. This is because the program must directly control the hardware being tested and leave as much of the RAM space as possible for examination. MemTest86(+) is designed to run as a stand-alone, self-contained program from a bootable USB flash drive, CD-ROM, floppy disk, or from a suitable boot manager without an operating system present. Each new release adds support for newer processors and chipsets. These programs work with nearly all PC-compatible computers from 80386- and 80486-based systems to the latest systems with 64-bit processors. However, version 5 of MemTest86 added a mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI) and UEFI support. Their on-screen appearance and functionality were almost identical up until the v4 releases. The other, known as Memtest86+, is a development fork of the original MemTest86. The original is simply known as MemTest86. ![]() There are two development streams of Memtest86. The application shows which memory locations failed and which patterns made them fail. Features ĭetections of faulty memory are displayed prominently. MemTest86+ 6.0 was released in October 2022, being rewritten for UEFI support, DDR4 and DDR5 RAM, and supporting all current AMD and Intel chipsets and CPUs. Version 10 states only UEFI boot and will not boot on non-UEFI systems, requiring separate download of the older 4.3.7 version which is also maintained on the official website downloads for that purpose. Version 6.0.0 () adds support for DDR4 RAM, and a row-hammer test based on research from Yoongu Kim, et al. ![]() When UEFI is not available, Version 5.0 (and later) fall back to BIOS booting and loads the old version 4.3.7. All UEFI versions are released under a proprietary freeware license. MemTest86 Version 5.0 (3 December 2013) was rewritten for UEFI booting, allowing for secure boot approval and mouse support. By then the feature set of the two forks were approximately equal. The BIOS version was updated under GPL until version 4.3.7. In February 2013, the original MemTest86 was sold to PassMark. Microsoft Windows has a similar feature (badmemorylist/badmemoryaccess), but manual conversion is required for setting it up. GRUB2 is able to supply this same information to an unpatched kernel, making the BadRAM patch unnecessary. ![]() Starting from MemTest86 2.3 and Memtest86+ 1.60, the program can output a list of bad RAM regions in the format expected by the BadRAM patch for the Linux kernel. Both versions now support current multi-core processors and the corresponding chipsets. The program is compiled as position-independent code so as to be able to move itself around and test all the memory regions. The bootloading code was originally derived from Linux 1.2.1. The source code of MemTest86 (BIOS version) and of the MemTest86+ fork is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). MemTest86 is written in C and x86 assembly. As of February 2023 the latest version of Memtest86+ is 6.10. After MemTest86 remained at version 3.0 (2002 release) for two years, Samuel Demeulemeester created the Memtest86+ fork to add support for newer CPUs and chipsets. MemTest86 was developed by Chris Brady in 1994. Each tries to verify that the RAM will accept and correctly retain arbitrary patterns of data written to it, that there are no errors where different bits of memory interact, and that there are no conflicts between memory addresses. MemTest86 and Memtest86+ are memory test software programs designed to test and stress test an x86 architecture computer's random-access memory (RAM) for errors, by writing test patterns to most memory addresses, reading back the data, and comparing for errors.
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