"badram" to the Rescue
Posted by Christopher Smith
I’ve hit a real “lucky” streak with my laptops of late, with one thing going wrong after another. The latest was yesterday, when I discovered just about every process I tried to spawn died with a segmentation fault. Not good. I stuck in my memtest86+ boot CD and let it grind away all night. After running several rounds of tests, it presented me with the magical badram incantation to tell the Linux kernel to ignore the problematic bits of memory. I dutifully copied down the values, edited my grub command line, and “voila!” everything is working just fine. I’d never used it before, but I have to say I’m impressed with how effective it is.