VM and N-order allocation failed.

VM and N-order allocation failed.

[David Ford]

I've a friend who has a small box doing routing/firewalling/nat for a 
/27 and the bandwidth is pretty tiny.  The machine has 32megs of ram and 
100 in swap.

It dies anywhere from an hour after reboot to 12 hours later, on console 
are messages like so "__alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed." and 
"ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet."

His prior kernel was 2.4.7, nothing special, he's using 3com 
3cSOHO100-TX and Cpq Neteligent 10/100.  I just upped him to 2.4.8 as a 
starter and we'll see how it's going.  I don't have direct access to the 
box so I can't give complete information.

Comments and suggestions welcomed,

David

Re: VM and N-order allocation failed.

[Daniel Phillips]

On August 15, 2001 11:21 pm, David Ford wrote:
> I've a friend who has a small box doing routing/firewalling/nat for a 
> /27 and the bandwidth is pretty tiny.  The machine has 32megs of ram and 
> 100 in swap.
> 
> It dies anywhere from an hour after reboot to 12 hours later, on console 
> are messages like so "__alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed." and 
> "ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet."
> 
> His prior kernel was 2.4.7, nothing special, he's using 3com 
> 3cSOHO100-TX and Cpq Neteligent 10/100.  I just upped him to 2.4.8 as a 
> starter and we'll see how it's going.  I don't have direct access to the 
> box so I can't give complete information.
> 
> Comments and suggestions welcomed,

We should add the GFP_* allocation flags to that allocation failed
message so we know whether it's atomic, noio, nofs, highmem or what.

Please define 'it dies' a little more precisely - oops, deadlock,
livelock, app terminated or what.  Then please supply the /proc/meminfo
if possible or shift-ScrLk dump to console (roughly the same thing).

He needs to upgrade 2.4.9-preX because that is where the VM work is
being done.  Finally, it would be worth merging this thread with the
following thread on linux-mm:

  0-order allocation problem

--
Daniel