5 ms·
Memtest86+ probably kills system controller on Lenovo Thinkpad T500 laptop
- gigatexal 8y agoThe sleuthing done in the big report is amazing.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoNever underestimate the power of competent and interested people with free time.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pedrocr 8y agoThe conclusion is that it's probably just a random fault, possibly triggered by the memtest running the laptop hot: "So, we have to seriously consider the possibility that two laptops died at the same time just by a coincidence."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 9935c101ab17a66 8y agoThere's a thorough update and report of troubleshooting at the bottom which strongly indicates it's not just a random fault. Did you read it?
- jchw 8y agoBelow that update is a response that pokes holes in the speculation. It seems to me like it could still be true, but there is some skepticism regarding how it happens and if it may just be random chance.
- pedrocr 8y agoI read the whole content on the page. There are three emails, all from the same person. I quoted his latest conclusions.
- hd4 8y agoEven the person submitting the report conceded that it was more to do with faulty hardware (VCC3SW malfunction) than anything wrong with memtest86. This needs to be flagged.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoWhy should it be flagged? The faulty hardware is the interesting part!
- Hydraulix989 8y agolm_sensors when misused can also kill hardware by "probing" registers the wrong way when looking for sensors. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/lm_sensors https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/lm_sensors Probing is different than testing, though, and people don't expect a general system memory testing tool to kill hardware (whereas lm_sensors has all sorts of warnings and takes the safest route possible by default). A tool that is designed to test general system RAM should not be touching memory-mapped I/O devices, and it's up to that tool to avoid them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chx 8y agoNote the T500 is ten years old.
- ErunamoJAZZ 8y agoyeah, but no one could run memtest in a young laptop.
- wolfgke 8y ago> yeah, but no one could run memtest in a young laptop. Would you explain this a little bit more?
- ErunamoJAZZ 8y agoFailure rate is usually high early in the time, low in middle, and high again at long term. In the context of hardware, this mean that at start laptops will fail soon (caught in factory), or it will fail later in the time. A 10 years old laptop have a high probability to fail, so the probability that someone wanted to run a memtest is very high too.
- 9935c101ab17a66 8y agoTo be fair, that doesn't explain what you said earlier. It's probably what you meant, but it isn't what you said.
- Hydraulix989 8y agoA great reason why someone might want to test its memory.
- hueving 8y agoTitle needs to be updated. It sounds like the load was likely the cause of triggering faulty hardware. Nothing specific about memtest.
- hirsin 8y agoI think it's more damning of the hardware with memtest in the title. It's literally a test program - by definition your hardware should pass it. If you fall to pass the test, and fail catastrophically, that's on you.
- watersb 8y agoI think this bug is worthy of HN attention. While unverified, the failure mode is something that I had not considered before. I did not get far with electrical engineering, way too deep into software as a career. I am getting back into simple things with Arduino and my hardware hobby is leading me to apply systems-level thinking in a different domain. If someone sends me a working T500 I will be happy to try memtest86+ on it.
- thomas 8y agoUpdate the title please
- jnwatson 8y agoIf the submitter was right, the problem was that the area of memory where a power controller's registers were mapped was not marked as "reserved", so it is entirely reasonable for memtest to poke at that memory. In other words, the failure is actually in the laptop's BIOS that provides the memory map.
- londons_explore 8y agoI had a T420 which mysteriously died when running memtest and would never power on again. Disassembly showed that the power button itself had no power, and I suspect it might have suffered the same fate.