FreeNAS burn in and QA with Memtest86+ locking up after 10 min; Memtest86+ 5.01 bug?

[LVLouisCyphre]

I've seem found a consistent failure with Memtest86+ 5.01; it consistently locks up after 10 minutes of testing when SMP mode is enabled on my pair of HP Microserver G7 N54Ls. I'm running Memtest86 4.3.7; it's running so far so good. Has anyone experienced this with Memtest86+ 5.01? Is the Memtest86+ 5.01 SMP code buggy? I'm tempted to install FreeBSD 12.1 on them and do a make clean then make buildworld after running Memtest86 4.3.7 on them for a day before installing FreeNAS. I think between Memtest86 and make buildworld I think one can call the memory and CPU as good.

 

[LVLouisCyphre]

Update; it appears to be indeed a bug in Memtest86+ which I've been running in SMP mode. Memtest86+ hasn't bee updated since this was posted and subsequently archived. The bug appears to only bite me when I'm running > 4 GB of memory which requires X64 mode (or 64-bit addressing). I've also tried the hidden SMP mode with F3. There's a bug with that too, it only reports half the memory most likely only the first memory slot and it also fails during test 7. In this attempt, 8:38 seconds.

 

[Ericloewe]

Memtest86+ is unfortunately abandoned and extremely buggy on modern-ish systems, as you've discovered.

 

[LVLouisCyphre]

Memtest86+ is unfortunately abandoned and extremely buggy on modern-ish systems, as you've discovered.

What do you recommend? Memtest 4.3.7 and Memtest86+ 5.01 both have FreeBSD ports.

 

[Ericloewe]

Ports? They're PC x86/x64 executables, so I'm guessing that's just a convenient boot option.

What do I recommend? Unfortunately, I don't have any recommendations. The open-source + version is fairly unreliable and the commercial non-+ version doesn't actually do some of the advanced things it says it does. It probably mostly works, though.

 

[demon]

I just used the standard Memtest86 8.3 for testing the RAM on my new build, and it worked just fine to boot it as a virtual USB flash disk via IPMI. Is there any reason that wouldn’t work for you?

 

[LVLouisCyphre]

Is there any reason that wouldn’t work for you?

RTFM.

"IMPORTANT: MemTest86 V8 images support only UEFI boot. On machines that don't support UEFI, MemTest86 will not boot. Please download the older V4 BIOS release of MemTest86 instead. "

I have two legacy BIOS systems; a pair of HP Microserver G7 N54Ls. Many of us still run legacy BIOS systems. Memtest86+ 5.01 not running in SMP mode is pretty much the same thing as Memtest86 4.3.7 which I have on some SARDU built USBs with Memtest86+ 5.01.

 

[demon]

Sorry, I missed that you were dealing with pre-UEFI gear. That must be really early x86_64 hardware then, I remember them existing but not in years.

 

[LVLouisCyphre]

Sorry, I missed that you were dealing with pre-UEFI gear. That must be really early x86_64 hardware then, I remember them existing but not in years.

Older non-UEFI hardware is appearing on eBay cheap. I acquired up a pair of HP MS G7 N54Ls in excellent condition complete for $188 shipped. All you need to run FreeNAS is a few AHCI ports and a minimum of 8 GB ECC memory. The only thing that typically requires UEFI booting are NVMe cards.