From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S268092AbUHXUHc (ORCPT ); Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:07:32 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267565AbUHXUHb (ORCPT ); Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:07:31 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:47802 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S268262AbUHXUHU (ORCPT ); Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:07:20 -0400 Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:05:31 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Dominik Karall Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: page allocation failure Message-Id: <20040824130531.3cbb03d1.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <200408242205.20571.dominik.karall@gmx.net> References: <200408242205.20571.dominik.karall@gmx.net> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.7 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Dominik Karall wrote: > > is this a kernel bug, or smbd failure? I think it could be caused by kernel > and less memory. Cause the machine is running with 56MB ram. But IMHO I think > the kernel shouldn't handle it this way. Running 2.6.8-rc4-mm1. It's networking trying to allocate eight physically-contiguous pages with GFP_ATOMIC. Can you say "snowball's chance in hell"? Probably we should kill off those noisy printk's, or make them dependent on some debugging option. But we keep on finding quite serious cases, such as this one. Sure, networking will recover from memory allocation failures - presumably by dropping a packet. But if it's doing frequent atomic 3-order allocations then it will end up dropping a *lot* of packets, and performance will suffer.