- Support for testing with multiple CPUs. All tests except for #11 (Bit
Fade) have been multi-threaded. A maximum of 16 CPUs will be used for testing.
- CPU detection has been completely re-written to use the brand ID string
rather than the cumbersome, difficult to maintain and often out of date
CPUID family information. All new processors will now be correctly
identified without requiring code support.
- All code related to controller identification, PCI and DMI has been removed.
This may be a controversial decision and was not made lightly. The following
are justifications for the decision:
- Controller identification has nothing to do with actual testing of
memory, the core purpose of Memtest86.
- This code needed to be updated with every new chipset. With the ever
growing number of chipsets it is not possible to keep up with the
changes. The result is that new chipsets were more often than not
reported in-correctly. In the authors opinion incorrect information is
worse than no information.
- Probing for chipset information carries the risk of making the program
crash.
- The amount of code involved with controller identification was quite
large, making support more difficult.
Removing this code also had the unfortunate effect of removing reporting of
correctable ECC errors. The code to support ECC was hopelessly intertwined
the controller identification code. A fresh, streamlined implementation of
ECC reporting is planned for a future release.
- A number of conditions existed that potentially cause problems
when testing more than 4 GB of memory. Most if not all of these conditions
have been identified and corrected.
- A number of cases were corrected where not all of memory was being tested.
For most tests the last word of each test block was not tested. In addition
an error in the paging code was fixed that omitted from testing the last 256
bytes of each block above 2 GB.
- The information display has been simplified and a number of details that were
not relevant to testing were removed.
- Memory speed measurement has been parallelized for more accurate reporting
for multi channel memory controllers.
- This is a major re-write of the Memtest86 with a large number of minor
bug-fixes and substantial cleanup and re-organization of the code.
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