From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 28 Aug 2001 14:20:36 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 28 Aug 2001 14:20:30 -0400 Received: from vasquez.zip.com.au ([203.12.97.41]:29959 "EHLO vasquez.zip.com.au") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 28 Aug 2001 14:20:13 -0400 Message-ID: <3B8BE0C9.78B12BB@zip.com.au> Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 11:19:53 -0700 From: Andrew Morton X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.8-ac9 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk CC: Jannik Rasmussen , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19? In-Reply-To: <3B8BD508.47CCA66D@zip.com.au> 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 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"? -