On 2/9/21 10:53 AM, Vít Ondruch wrote:
Dne 08. 02. 21 v 21:44 Chris Murphy napsal(a):
On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 2:46 AM Vít Ondruch vondruch@redhat.com wrote:
Being devils advocate, but should we have the memtest86 or similar by default? I have certainly not used this feature in my 10+ yeas with Fedora.
You mean get rid of it (from media and installations)?
Yes, that is my proposal.
Because we install it unconditionally already, even though it's a BIOS only utility and there isn't a boot entry for it in the bootloader.
It's a bit obscure how to use it, given there's no menu entry for it.
Ah, good to know that I have it on my system. I'm going to remove it right now.
Enjoy the 357 KB space savings. :)
I don't think this is utility, which is targets typical Fedora user. Here is PR proposing the removal:
A memory testing utility is certainly something useful in ruling out hardware reasons for system crashes. Even Microsoft has included one in recent versions of Windows. Being BIOS only is a problem, yes, but that makes it even more useful to have on the installation media, because I can enable the legacy BIOS CSM and boot the installation DVD on my UEFI systems, while I can't really install it on my hard drive and enable it in the GRUB menu if I have an UEFI install. Now, I would need to use a different installation media to run this tool for the sake of reducing the >2GB installation image by several kilobytes. Doesn't sound like a great idea to me.
I agree it should not be installed by default on UEFI systems and I think it should probably have been enabled by default in the GRUB menu on BIOS systems. I also agree an alternative like PCMemTest is needed for UEFI systems, because not all systems have legacy BIOS CSMs.
Nikolay