On Sun, 22 Jan 2017 12:33:08 +0100 Zoran Stojsavljevic zoran.stojsavljevic@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Stefan,
In addition what Charlotte wrote to you, I would advise you the following (as general approach for mem problems): [1] Please, for testing the memory, use secondary Coreboot payload called MEMTEST: [user@localhost coreboot]$ cat .config | grep MEMTEST CONFIG_MEMTEST_SECONDARY_PAYLOAD=y CONFIG_MEMTEST_STABLE=y # CONFIG_MEMTEST_MASTER is not set
Instead going to SeaBIOS or GRUB2 as payloads. This memtest86+ could (my best guess) show to you what is wrong with your memory configuration.
[2] You can also (since you are able to in some cases go to Linux) stop in GRUB2, after installing from Linux memtest86+ package into the GRUB2 boot options (this can also help too, my best guess).
(extra advise: if you use legacy/CSM ON, which is in Coreboot in 99.999% cases used, it would be much easier for you to deal with memtest86+)
Hi Zoran,
I am not exactly sure what you are trying to convey. I mentioned that memtest did lock up after some seconds with the vendor firmware in my previous mail. Of course it's the first thing to try when memory problems arise - I just tried to boot Linux to retrieve the e820 map because Nico requested it on IRC. I presume that using memtest as primary or secondary payload or booted from GRUB2 would not produce different results (unless the binaries are different of course), no?
Hello Stefan,
Let me ask you for some other stuff, since I would like to put what I wrote initially to hold (sleep state, for now).
You wrote: *The official specs are not trustworthy IMHO and cpuid(1) and /proc/cpuinfo **show the same physical address width of 36 bits (which would indicate a **maximum of 64 GB).*
Question to you: are you dealing with i686 kernel, (32 bit)? It seems to me that you have Nehalem which complies in IA32 with PAE HW extension, don't you?!
What is PAE? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
In computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing, *Physical Address Extension* (*PAE*), sometimes referred to as *Page Address Extension*, is a memory management feature for the IA-32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-32 architecture. *PAE was first introduced in the **Pentium Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro. It defines a page table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_table hierarchy of three levels, with table entries of 64 bits each instead of 32, allowing these CPUs to access a physical address space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space larger than 4 gigabytes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte (232** bytes)*.
This is very important -> *Enabling PAE (by setting bit 5, PAE, of the system register CR4) causes major changes to this scheme...*
Thank you, Zoran
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 3:10 PM, Stefan Tauner < stefan.tauner@alumni.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
On Sun, 22 Jan 2017 12:33:08 +0100 Zoran Stojsavljevic zoran.stojsavljevic@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Stefan,
In addition what Charlotte wrote to you, I would advise you the following (as general approach for mem problems): [1] Please, for testing the memory, use secondary Coreboot payload called MEMTEST: [user@localhost coreboot]$ cat .config | grep MEMTEST CONFIG_MEMTEST_SECONDARY_PAYLOAD=y CONFIG_MEMTEST_STABLE=y # CONFIG_MEMTEST_MASTER is not set
Instead going to SeaBIOS or GRUB2 as payloads. This memtest86+ could (my best guess) show to you what is wrong with your memory configuration.
[2] You can also (since you are able to in some cases go to Linux) stop
in
GRUB2, after installing from Linux memtest86+ package into the GRUB2 boot options (this can also help too, my best guess).
(extra advise: if you use legacy/CSM ON, which is in Coreboot in 99.999% cases used, it would be much easier for you to deal with memtest86+)
Hi Zoran,
I am not exactly sure what you are trying to convey. I mentioned that memtest did lock up after some seconds with the vendor firmware in my previous mail. Of course it's the first thing to try when memory problems arise - I just tried to boot Linux to retrieve the e820 map because Nico requested it on IRC. I presume that using memtest as primary or secondary payload or booted from GRUB2 would not produce different results (unless the binaries are different of course), no?
-- Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner
-
Stefan Tauner -
Zoran Stojsavljevic