Hello!

My computer currently runs smoothly with two DIMMs that were considered dead,
just because they suffered from static discharge. A RAM checker told me what
sections of the RAMs were indeed dead, and all the rest could be exploited.

I can use 61 MB out of 64 MB, which is a great result, and good for trees.
My main concern regarding trees is not reuse of RAM that suffered from static
electricity, but to be able to use RAM in spite of manufacturing errors; a very
large portion of RAMs (95% of the production?) must now be discarded of due to
such errors. Trees don't like that.

The patch (for Linux kernel 2.2.14) to make this all possible can be found at
	http://home.zonnet.nl/vanrein/badram/
and is a rather minimalistic solution. It's my first kernal patch, so I value
your feedback (please send it Cc. to vanrein@zonnet.nl).


There are some issues on which I would like to hear your comments:

 * Can anybody test on non-i386? I cannot, so I didn't attempt to write
   the arch-specific code yet. However, it seems straightforward to do,
   so let me know if you can test (with broken RAM) and I'll send you code.

 * Is it worth the extra kernel code to exploit even more RAM by, say,
   allocate slabs around the bugs? For 32-bytes slabs [i386], that would mean
   that 63.976563MB out of 64MB can be used! This additional code would
   have to be a kernel compilation option, only compiled-in for people that
   run on BadRAMs.

 * If this is considered useful, how do I submit it to the kernel?
   Should there [also] be a 2.3.x patch?


Enjoy,

-Rick van Rein.