From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266498AbUJWKhJ (ORCPT ); Sat, 23 Oct 2004 06:37:09 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S266768AbUJWKeb (ORCPT ); Sat, 23 Oct 2004 06:34:31 -0400 Received: from smtp201.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ([216.136.129.91]:57709 "HELO smtp201.mail.sc5.yahoo.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S266891AbUJWK3d (ORCPT ); Sat, 23 Oct 2004 06:29:33 -0400 Message-ID: <417A3288.1000303@yahoo.com.au> Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 20:29:28 +1000 From: Nick Piggin User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040820 Debian/1.7.2-4 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Justin Piszcz CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Page Allocation Failures Return With 2.6.9+TSO patch. References: <417A2106.7010804@yahoo.com.au> <417A251A.2040209@yahoo.com.au> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Justin Piszcz wrote: > It does not seem like they do, but they cannot be good... > It seems almost inevitable that they'll happen, especially if a module is loaded after boot (this is actually somewhere that incremental min will help "echo some number > /proc/sys/vm/lower_zone_protection"). But from the code, the failures really won't hurt at all. It might double the number of interrupts coming from your soundcard, but I dare say you would never be able to notice a difference. > I have applied the following patches > > 1] TSO patch > 2] rollup.patch > > Rebooting now and will alert the list if/when I receive more page > allocation failures. > > FYI - I started getting these with 2.6.9. > > (However, it was always possible on the Dell Optiplex GX1 to create page > allocation failure with: ifconfig eth0 mtu 9000), however, on a > higher-end machine (2.6GHZ, 2GB ram, etc) ifconfig eth0 mtu 9000 worked > fine. > > Is it something with the architecture of the box bus/box? > No, probably just different configurations or memory usage patterns of the kernel, maybe different drivers, etc. > Why does it tend to affect one machine and not the other? > Again, luck of the draw mainly. My patch should definitely help the TSO allocation failures (it probably won't fix the sound buffer alloc failure though, now that I've looked at it).