Talk:Memtest86+

Memtest failures
I tried this with memtest+-4.20-r1 and grub2 and when I reboot and try to run the image, I get an error that /boot/memtest86plus/memtest is not found.

memtest+-5.01 worked fine with grub2

Johnjaylward (talk) 21:09, 2 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi, this is probably something to ask about on the forums or in Gentoo's support channel on IRC (. Once you determine the issue then you can come back here and let us know if our documentation is wrong, or if you had a user error. :) Kind regards, --Maffblaster (talk) 17:52, 3 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi . I didn't change any default settings. My guess is that the grub2 setup for 4.x is wrong. The grub2 setup for 5.x is certainly more involved than what was shown for 4.x. I was simply noting here for other users that try and fail with 4.x that 5.x was working. If you want I can open a bug, but I see no reason to start a discussion about this on either irc or the forums.
 * Johnjaylward (talk) 17:59, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

grub2 command
On my system, the grub2 config command is and not. Not sure if that is standard on all systems now, or if it is due to some use-flag I enabled at some point. If it is standard, we should update that. Johnjaylward (talk) 18:12, 3 June 2016 (UTC)


 * Noted in the article. Thanks. - dcljr (talk) 19:44, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Wrong memtest86+ binaries
I tried to use memtest86+ with syslinux. However given 'memtest' binary doesn't work, but 'memtest.bin' works fine. In this page 'memtest' binary should be replaced by 'memtest.bin'.


 * Okay. Please make the edit to change it. --Maffblaster (talk) 16:12, 14 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Closing after a couple of years of no activity. --Maffblaster (talk) 23:45, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

pcmemtest
I just came across https://github.com/martinwhitaker/pcmemtest which might be of interest. I've not tried it. It claims: PCMemTest is a fork and rewrite of Memtest86+, which in turn was a fork of Memtest86. The purpose of the rewrite was to:

make the code more readable and easier to maintain make the code 64-bit clean and support UEFI boot fix failures seen when building with newer versions of GCC

In the process, a number of features of Memtest86+ that are not required for the main purpose of PCMemTest (testing the system memory) have been dropped. In particular, no attempt is made to measure the cache and main memory speed, or to identify and report the DRAM type. This should allow PCMemTest to work without modification on future hardware.

PCMemTest is based on the last public release of Memtest86+, v5.01.

Goverp (talk) 11:23, 6 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the info. Looks like is not available in gentoo:: at this time. We'll close this discussion unless there's something relevant to discuss. Thank you! --Maffblaster (talk) 23:47, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Improve information for choices
I think that there is still some confusion regarding the three versions in the repository and their UEFI support.


 * sys-apps/memtest86, currently at 4.3.7-r2. That seems to be the last version of the 4.x "branch" from PassMark (www.memtest86.com). It is from 2014 and has no UEFI support.
 * sys-apps/memtest86+, currently at 5.31b-r3. That is the latest release from www.memtest.org from May 2020. It has no UEFI support, too! It is version 5 of PassMark'smemtest86 (not memtest86+) that introduced UEFI support. Side note: There is an announcement at http://www.memtest.org/ (dated tomorrow?) about UEFI support (and more) in a the planned version 6, including a link to the repository.
 * sys-apps/memtest86-bin, currently at 9.4. That is the latest version from from PassMark (free). On my computer with UEFI and rEFInd (but no grub), this was the only one that worked right after installation. (rEFIndautomatically created a menu entry.)

So the choices are
 * Older, non-UEFI systems: Either memtest86 or memtest86+
 * UEFI systems: memtest86-bin

What I do not know, but may be of interest
 * Can a non-UEFI system use grub or another secondary bootloader to chainload the EFI executable provided by memtest86-bin? (Would lead to more choices)
 * What are the differences (licence, features, hardware support) between the current memtest86 and memtest86+ packages that users might need to know to make a choice?

(I would edit right away, but this is my first contribution, so I rather wait for comments)

--Agroth (talk) 14:05, 23 April 2022 (UTC)