RE: arcmsr & areca-1660 - strange behaviour under heavy load

["nickcheng" <nick.cheng@areca.com.tw>]

Hi Nikola,
Please put support@areca.com.tw in the loop.
I am sure Areca support, Kevin, has taken over your case.
If you like, please let him know your configuration and operations to
synchronize both sides.
Thank you for your patience and sorry for your inconvenience,

-----Original Message-----
From: Zan Lynx [mailto:zlynx@acm.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 5:04 AM
To: Nikola Ciprich
Cc: Andrew Morton; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org;
Nick Cheng; Erich Chen; kopi@linuxbox.cz
Subject: Re: arcmsr & areca-1660 - strange behaviour under heavy load


On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 20:29 +0100, Nikola Ciprich wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> no, right now I have the machine in the weird state, swap is empty (3GB), 
> and so is bigger part of RAM (~100MB free), and the gcc crashes even when 
> trying to compile c program with empty main function. so it doesn't seem 
> to be problem with memory exhaustion.

Maybe memory fragmentation?  Perhaps the driver tries to allocate a
large block of memory and cannot find a continuous block of the right
size.

Maybe the driver developers used different kernel .config options than
you are using.  

Try increasing the value in /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes.

Try switching some things like SLAB or SLUB, try booting with
kernelcore=512M to enable the Movable memory zone, or try 64-bit vs
32-bit kernels. 
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx@acm.org>