Is it possible to lock bad bits in RAM on Linux?

Question

Recently I bought 8 GB of RAM and it has bad bits. Is it possible to lock the bad bits to make Linux avoid them?

Answer 1

There's a suggestion here. There's also a kernel patch called badRAM but not, I think, for anything after 2.6.28.

The blog suggestion regarding memmap looks to be derived from a note included in the kernel source documentation, src/Documentation/bad_memory.txt; this note is still in the (currently most recent) 3.7.10 source as are references to the memmap boot time parameter (src/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt). There are various possible reasons for incorporating such a feature into the kernel, and although this particular use-value may be unintentional, it seems like a sound idea IMHO and is worth a try (it's also very simple to do). I did not find any reports of it not working, at least, and the fact that the bad_memory.txt note has been left in the kernel source docs for 4+ years is a good sign.