Re: kernel: __alloc_pages: 1-order allocation failed

Marcelo Tosatti
2001-08-27T22:28:55Z

On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Daniel Phillips wrote:

> On August 27, 2001 10:14 pm, Andrew Kay wrote:
> > I am having some rather serious problems with the memory management (i
> > think) in the 2.4.x kernels. I am currently on the 2.4.9 and get lots
> > of these errors in /var/log/messages.
> >
> > Aug 24 15:08:04 dell63 kernel: __alloc_pages: 1-order allocation failed.
> > Aug 24 15:08:35 dell63 last message repeated 448 times
> > Aug 24 15:09:37 dell63 last message repeated 816 times
> > Aug 24 15:10:38 dell63 last message repeated 1147 times
> >
> > I am running a Redhat 7.1 distro w/2.4.9 kernel on a Dell poweredge 6300
> > (4x500Mhz cpu, 4Gb ram). I get this error while running the specmail
> > 2001 benchmarking software against our email server, Intrastore. The
> > system is very idle from what I can see. The sar output shows user cpu
> > at around 1% and everything else rather low as well. It seems to pop up
> > randomly and requires a reboot to fix it.
> >
> > Is there any workarounds or something I can do to get a more useful
> > debug message than this?
>
> Please apply this patch:
>
> --- 2.4.9.clean/mm/page_alloc.c Thu Aug 16 12:43:02 2001
> +++ 2.4.9/mm/page_alloc.c Mon Aug 20 22:05:40 2001
> @@ -502,7 +502,8 @@
> }
>
> /* No luck.. */
> - printk(KERN_ERR "__alloc_pages: %lu-order allocation failed.\n", order);
> + printk(KERN_ERR "__alloc_pages: %lu-order allocation failed (gfp=0x%x/%i).\n",
> + order, gfp_mask, !!(current->flags & PF_MEMALLOC));
> return NULL;
> }
>

Daniel,

Its probably the bounce buffering thingie.

I'll send a patch to Linus soon.