Re: 2.6.9 - e1000 - page allocation failed

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Francois Romieu <romieu@fr.zoreil.com> wrote:
>
> Lukas Hejtmanek <xhejtman@mail.muni.cz> :
> [page allocation failure with e1000]
> 
> If you are using TSO, try patch below by Herbert Xu (available
> from http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-netdev&m=109799935603132&w=3)
> 
> --- 1.67/net/ipv4/tcp_output.c	2004-10-01 13:56:45 +10:00
> +++ edited/net/ipv4/tcp_output.c	2004-10-17 18:58:47 +10:00
> @@ -455,8 +455,12 @@
>  {
>  	struct tcp_opt *tp = tcp_sk(sk);
>  	struct sk_buff *buff;
> -	int nsize = skb->len - len;
> +	int nsize;
>  	u16 flags;
> +
> +	nsize = skb_headlen(skb) - len;
> +	if (nsize < 0)
> +		nsize = 0;
>  
>  	if (skb_cloned(skb) &&
>  	    skb_is_nonlinear(skb) &&

I'd be interested in knowing if this fixes it - I don't expect it will,
because that's a zero-order allocation failure.  He's really out of memory.

The e1000 driver has a default rx ring size of 256 which seems a bit nutty:
a back-to-back GFP_ATOMIC allocation of 256 skbs could easily exhaust the
page allocator pools.

Probably this machine needs to increase /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes.