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(a)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:
https://pagure.io/fedora-kickstarts/pull-request/754
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