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We are pleased to announce the beta release of version 5 of Memtest86.
Downloads:
Update: As of 4/Dec/2013, the beta testing period has finished and V5 has been released. Downloads are now available on the normal MemTest86 download page.
Installation Instructions:
http://www.memtest86.com/technical.htm (same as v4)
Features
About UEFI
UEFI stand for ‘Unified Extensible Firmware Interface’ and is the replacement for BIOS, which newer motherboards run on. UEFI was developed to overcome the limitations of BIOS, such as executing in 16-bit processor mode and only having 1 MB addressable space, which aren’t acceptable for modern PCs.
See Wikipedia for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified...ware_Interface
Dual Boot
We are releasing Memtest86 v5 with support to boot to v4 if UEFI is not available, or if you would like to run the older version on newer systems.
On UEFI systems the media that Memtest is installed to will likely show up twice in the boot options.
This is an example of one particular boot menu on a UEFI system. This computer has fixed hard drives, a CD-ROM drive and a USB drive with memtest86 plugged in.
P5, P3 and P4 are the fixed hard drives and the CD-ROM drive. The USB drive in this case is a ‘KingstonDT 101 G2’ for which there are two entries in this list. The first entry will boot from the USB drive in emulated BIOS mode, which will launch version 4 of Memtest. The second option will boot with UEFI launching Memtest 5.
Limitations
Version 5 no longer is able to remap itself to different portions of memory in order to run tests in the section of memory it was occupying. UEFI itself also takes up some space compared to a traditional BIOS. So slightly less RAM can be tested in V5 compared to V4. It should be noted however even larger areas of memory are lost to devices doing memory mapped IO, most notably integrated video cards. So no version of MemTest86 can test 100% of the RAM. 95% - 99% coverage is more typical.
We have seen at least one machine (a HP Workstation XW8200) fail to boot at all, with the message 'Non-System disk or disk error'. This is an old machine that can only run BIOS version so in this case it would be advisable to download and run the 4.3 standalone version which is known to work.
Secure Boot
One of the new features of UEFI is ‘Secure Boot’ which does not allow loading of drivers or operating systems that do not have a valid digital signature. Memtest86 does not have such a signature so if this feature is enabled then Memtest will fail to boot. Most systems have this disabled by default, however if it is enabled you will need to go into the UEFI settings and disable it in order to boot. More details on secure boot and MemTest86 can be found here.
How to Report Problems
Either make a post here in the forum, or send us an email at the address listed on our contact page. When reporting an error please provide as much details as possible. If you are using v5 on a USB drive, there should be a log file that has been generated in the 'EFI/BOOT' directory called MemTest86.log. Sending us this will be of great help. Additionally a photograph of the problem would also be useful if possible/applicable.
Version 5 Screenshots
Configuration screen
Main test screen
Optional report written to disk
Detailed RAM SPD data
Downloads:
Update: As of 4/Dec/2013, the beta testing period has finished and V5 has been released. Downloads are now available on the normal MemTest86 download page.
Installation Instructions:
http://www.memtest86.com/technical.htm (same as v4)
Features
- Completely re-written to work under UEFI.
- Native 64-bit support
- No longer requires the use of the PAE workaround to access more than 4GB of memory. (PAE = Physical Address Extension)
- Mouse support, where supported by the underlying UEFI system. On older systems a keyboard is still required.
- Improved USB keyboard support. The keyboard now works on systems that fail to emulate IO Port 64/60 correctly. So Mac USB keyboards are now supported.
- Improved multi-threading support, where supported by the underlying UEFI system.
- Dual boot with Memtest version 4 for supporting older systems without UEFI. So with a single USB or CD drive both UEFI systems and BIOS systems can be supported.
- Reporting of detailed RAM SPD information. Timings, clock speeds, vendor names and much more.
- Support to writing to the USB drive that Memtest is running from for logging and report generation. In all prior MemTest releases there was no disk support.
- Use of GPT. (GUID Partition Table)
- ECC RAM support (still under development at this point)
- Detection of ECC support in both the RAM and memory controller
- Polling for ECC errors
- Injection of ECC errors for test purposes. (limited hardware only)
- DDR4 support (Cancelled due to lack of test hardware, we'll revisit this in 2014 when DDR4 is available for testing)
- Option to disable CPU caching for all tests
- Having a configuration file to allow settings to be pre-defined without the need for keyboard input. This can help with automation.
- Support for secure boot. (still under development, not available in beta as yet)
- Speed improvements of between 10% and 30%+. Especially for tests, #7, #8 & #9. This is the result more moving to native 64bit code, removing the PAE paging hack, switching compilers and using faster random number generation algorithms.
- Addition of 2 new memory tests to take advantage of 64bit data and SIMD instructions.
About UEFI
UEFI stand for ‘Unified Extensible Firmware Interface’ and is the replacement for BIOS, which newer motherboards run on. UEFI was developed to overcome the limitations of BIOS, such as executing in 16-bit processor mode and only having 1 MB addressable space, which aren’t acceptable for modern PCs.
See Wikipedia for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified...ware_Interface
Dual Boot
We are releasing Memtest86 v5 with support to boot to v4 if UEFI is not available, or if you would like to run the older version on newer systems.
On UEFI systems the media that Memtest is installed to will likely show up twice in the boot options.
This is an example of one particular boot menu on a UEFI system. This computer has fixed hard drives, a CD-ROM drive and a USB drive with memtest86 plugged in.
P5, P3 and P4 are the fixed hard drives and the CD-ROM drive. The USB drive in this case is a ‘KingstonDT 101 G2’ for which there are two entries in this list. The first entry will boot from the USB drive in emulated BIOS mode, which will launch version 4 of Memtest. The second option will boot with UEFI launching Memtest 5.
Limitations
Version 5 no longer is able to remap itself to different portions of memory in order to run tests in the section of memory it was occupying. UEFI itself also takes up some space compared to a traditional BIOS. So slightly less RAM can be tested in V5 compared to V4. It should be noted however even larger areas of memory are lost to devices doing memory mapped IO, most notably integrated video cards. So no version of MemTest86 can test 100% of the RAM. 95% - 99% coverage is more typical.
We have seen at least one machine (a HP Workstation XW8200) fail to boot at all, with the message 'Non-System disk or disk error'. This is an old machine that can only run BIOS version so in this case it would be advisable to download and run the 4.3 standalone version which is known to work.
Secure Boot
One of the new features of UEFI is ‘Secure Boot’ which does not allow loading of drivers or operating systems that do not have a valid digital signature. Memtest86 does not have such a signature so if this feature is enabled then Memtest will fail to boot. Most systems have this disabled by default, however if it is enabled you will need to go into the UEFI settings and disable it in order to boot. More details on secure boot and MemTest86 can be found here.
How to Report Problems
Either make a post here in the forum, or send us an email at the address listed on our contact page. When reporting an error please provide as much details as possible. If you are using v5 on a USB drive, there should be a log file that has been generated in the 'EFI/BOOT' directory called MemTest86.log. Sending us this will be of great help. Additionally a photograph of the problem would also be useful if possible/applicable.
Version 5 Screenshots
Configuration screen
Main test screen
Optional report written to disk
Detailed RAM SPD data
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