Memtest86

The Memtest86 payload.

Memtest86 is a program which checks your RAM modules.

It can be run from within GRUB, but also as a coreboot payload (i.e. included in your ROM chip).

Building

Memtest86

mkdir foo
cd foo
wget http://www.memtest86.com/memtest86-3.5.tar.gz
tar xfvz memtest86-3.5.tar.gz
cd memtest86-3.5

(Optional: edit config.h and set #define SERIAL_CONSOLE_DEFAULT 1 for serial support)

make

The file memtest is your final payload which you can use with coreboot (v2 or v3), either on real hardware or in a QEMU image.

coreboot

Finally, you have to build coreboot (v3 in this example) with Memtest86 as payload:

cd ..
svn co svn://coreboot.org/repository/coreboot-v3 -r656
cp memtest86-3.4/memtest coreboot-v3/payload.elf
cd coreboot-v3
make menuconfig

Now enter the Payload menu and select Payload type and then An ELF executable payload file. Now exit the menu, save your settings, and build coreboot:

make

The file build/coreboot.rom (or build/bios.bin) is your final coreboot v3 image, which also contains the payload.

Running Memtest86 in QEMU

For running the coreboot+Memtest86 image in QEMU, you need a patched version of vgabios-cirrus.bin in your build directory first:

cd build
wget http://www.coreboot.org/images/0/0d/Vgabios-cirrus.zip
unzip Vgabios-cirrus.zip
cd ..

You can now run coreboot and Memtest86 in QEMU:

qemu -L build -hda /dev/zero -serial stdio

Ready-made QEMU image

Please follow these instructions if you want to try out coreboot and Memtest86 in QEMU.

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