kernel: __alloc_pages: 1-order allocation failed

Andrew Kay
2001-08-27T20:17:40Z

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? It doesn't seem to throw any other visible
errors. Maybe an older more stable kernel or less memory? I have the
sar output if anyone is interested. This bug is the only current
roadblock for me to publish specmail 2001 results to spec.org. It can
be reproduced fairly easily with a little setup time.

Thanks,
Andy