On 07/08/2014 01:22 PM, John R Pierce wrote: > On 7/8/2014 9:25 AM, Lamar Owen wrote: >> Physical servers can be told to skip certain parts of their POST, >> especially the memory test. Memory tests are redundant with ECC. > but, you HAVE to zero ALL of memory with ECC to initialize it. > True enough; but this shouldn't take five minutes on a server with multiple GB/s memory bandwidth. My Dell 6950's take a full five minutes to POST, and that's ridiculous. There's eight cores; each core has enough bandwidth to its local RAM (NUMA, of course) where it should be able to sustain 2GB/s zeroing without a lot of trouble; that's a rate of 16GB/s aggregate, and my 32GB of RAM should be zeroed in 2 seconds or so. Not five minutes. It's still not as bad as our Sun Enterprise 6500 with 18GB, though, which takes about a minute per GB, which is also ridiculous (it's also NUMA, and the Sun firmware does start up each CPU to test it's own local RAM blocks).