Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

[Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Possibly, VM system changes have taken you over some threshold.
> Are you putting a lot of traffic through that machine?

There's <= 2500 messages (sendmail - usually <5 concurrently) going
through per day, some 10.000 pop connections per day (mostly at working
hours). The server's got some 256 megs of RAM, and is doing some small
databases with postgresql and mysql in addition to the apache server. The
server does not have any problems with swapping, as the text below should
show.

As far as I can see from linux/mm/swap.c, it shouldn't have anything to do
with freepages... Am I wrong?

roy

[root@server log]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        257876     252976       4900      64120      65156     147368
-/+ buffers/cache:      40452     217424
Swap:       136512        268     136244



> Have you tried altering the `freepages' setting?
>
> Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> >
> > But...
> >
> > I haven't seen the problem before 2.2.19. Going back to 2.2.16 solved it
> >
> > On Mon, 27 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > > Well, it shouldn't hang - it should just fail to do anything for a while
> > > and then recover.
> > >
> > > You can reserve more memory for the network driver by altering
> > > the contents of /proc/sys/vm/freepages.  Try doubling everything
> > > in there.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Hi
> > > >
> > > > I have a 3c900 card in a server, and after upgrading to 2.2.19 it started
> > > > hanging every now and then, giving me the error message "kernel: eth0:
> > > > memory shortage". The card is this (as reported during boot)
> > > >
> > > > 3c59x.c:v0.99H 27May00 Donald Becker
> > > > http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html
> > > > eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang 10Mbps Combo at 0xa800,  00:a0:24:ef:ef:50, IRQ 5
> > > >   8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, 10baseT interface.
> > > >   Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives.
> > > >
> > > > Please cc: to me (roy@karlsbakk.net) and Jannik (jannik@east.no), as we're
> > > > not on the list.
> > > >
> > > > Best regards
> > > >
> > > > roy
> > > >
> > > > -
> > > > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> > > > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> > > > More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> > > > Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
> > >
>

Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

[Andrew Morton]

Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > Possibly, VM system changes have taken you over some threshold.
> > Are you putting a lot of traffic through that machine?
> 
> There's <= 2500 messages (sendmail - usually <5 concurrently) going
> through per day, some 10.000 pop connections per day (mostly at working
> hours). The server's got some 256 megs of RAM, and is doing some small
> databases with postgresql and mysql in addition to the apache server. The
> server does not have any problems with swapping, as the text below should
> show.
> 
> As far as I can see from linux/mm/swap.c, it shouldn't have anything to do
> with freepages... Am I wrong?
> 
> roy
> 
> [root@server log]# free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        257876     252976       4900      64120      65156     147368
> -/+ buffers/cache:      40452     217424
> Swap:       136512        268     136244
> 

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.

-

Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

[Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > > Possibly, VM system changes have taken you over some threshold.
> > > Are you putting a lot of traffic through that machine?
> >
> > There's <= 2500 messages (sendmail - usually <5 concurrently) going
> > through per day, some 10.000 pop connections per day (mostly at working
> > hours). The server's got some 256 megs of RAM, and is doing some small
> > databases with postgresql and mysql in addition to the apache server. The
> > server does not have any problems with swapping, as the text below should
> > show.
> >
> > As far as I can see from linux/mm/swap.c, it shouldn't have anything to do
> > with freepages... Am I wrong?
> >
> > roy
> >
> > [root@server log]# free
> >              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> > Mem:        257876     252976       4900      64120      65156     147368
> > -/+ buffers/cache:      40452     217424
> > Swap:       136512        268     136244
> >
>
> 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?

ory

Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

[Andrew Morton]

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"?

-

Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

[Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:

> 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"?

The server locked up and needed a hard reboot

roy

Re: Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

[Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk]

But...

I haven't seen the problem before 2.2.19. Going back to 2.2.16 solved it

On Mon, 27 Aug 2001, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Well, it shouldn't hang - it should just fail to do anything for a while
> and then recover.
>
> You can reserve more memory for the network driver by altering
> the contents of /proc/sys/vm/freepages.  Try doubling everything
> in there.
>
>
>
> Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> >
> > Hi
> >
> > I have a 3c900 card in a server, and after upgrading to 2.2.19 it started
> > hanging every now and then, giving me the error message "kernel: eth0:
> > memory shortage". The card is this (as reported during boot)
> >
> > 3c59x.c:v0.99H 27May00 Donald Becker
> > http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html
> > eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang 10Mbps Combo at 0xa800,  00:a0:24:ef:ef:50, IRQ 5
> >   8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, 10baseT interface.
> >   Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives.
> >
> > Please cc: to me (roy@karlsbakk.net) and Jannik (jannik@east.no), as we're
> > not on the list.
> >
> > Best regards
> >
> > roy
> >
> > -
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> > the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
> > More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
> > Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>

Error 3c900 driver in 2.2.19?

[Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk]

Hi

I have a 3c900 card in a server, and after upgrading to 2.2.19 it started
hanging every now and then, giving me the error message "kernel: eth0:
memory shortage". The card is this (as reported during boot)

3c59x.c:v0.99H 27May00 Donald Becker
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html
eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang 10Mbps Combo at 0xa800,  00:a0:24:ef:ef:50, IRQ 5
  8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, 10baseT interface.
  Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives.

Please cc: to me (roy@karlsbakk.net) and Jannik (jannik@east.no), as we're
not on the list.

Best regards

roy