Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

[Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au>]

Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> 
> > Networking needs to allocate memory at interrupt time.  This is
> > referred to as "atomic allocation".  The only way in which this
> > can be successful is for the VM system to ensure that there is
> > a pool of immediately-allocatable memory lying around.
> >
> > The 2.2 kernel uses the tunables in /proc/sys/vm/freepages to
> > decide how large that pool should be.  Machines which sustain
> > a high network load commonly require more memory than the
> > default freepages setting provides.  People who encounter network
> > Rx allocation failures with 2.2 kernels do report that increasing
> > the freepages tunables fixes the problem.
> >
> > -
> >
> 
> Thanks
> 
> But... Should the server hang after experiencing problems with this? On
> 2.2.19?
> 

Absolutely not.  If the network driver experiences 32 successive
memory allocation failures it will fall back to a timer-driven mode
where it tries to refill its buffer ring once per second.  This
code works.

If your machine is completely locking up and needs a reset then
something is presumably not handling out-of-memory correctly.

What do you mean by "the server hangs"?

-