Stand alone memory test for x86 architecture computers

Memtest86 software is designed to be a stand alone memory test for x86 architecture computers. BIOS based memory tests are a quick, cursory check and often miss many of the failures that are detected by Memtest86.

Memtest86 is released under the terms of the Gnu Public License (GPL). Other than the provisions of the GNU pubic licence (GPL) there are no restrictions for use, private or commercial.

Explicit permission for inclusion of Memtest86 in software compilations and publications is hereby granted.

Memtest86 Release 4.0 with multi-CPU support is now available

# Support for testing with multiple CPUs. All tests except for #11 (Bit Fade) have been multi-threaded. A maximum of 16 CPUs will be used for testing.
# CPU detection has been completely re-written to use the brand ID string rather than the cumbersome, difficult to maintain and often out of date CPUID family information. All new processors will now be correctly identified without requiring code support.
# All code related to controller identification, PCI and DMI has been removed. This may be a controversial decision and was not made lightly. The following are justifications for the decision:

1. Controller identification has nothing to do with actual testing of memory, the core purpose of Memtest86.
2. This code needed to be updated with every new chipset. With the ever growing number of chipsets it is not possible to keep up with the changes. The result is that new chipsets were more often than not reported in-correctly. In the authors opinion incorrect information is worse than no information.
3. Probing for chipset information carries the risk of making the program crash.
4. The amount of code involved with controller identification was quite large, making support more difficult.

Removing this code also had the unfortunate effect of removing reporting of correctable ECC errors. The code to support ECC was hopelessly intertwined the controller identification code.