There seems to be something fishy with highmem in 2.4.20:
Using XFree86 4.3.0 (Matrox G550) and KDE 3.1.1 works with the following
kernel configuration options:
CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM=y
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G is not set
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM is not set
However I do get "ldt allocation failed" messages, heavy swapping and an
unuseable GUI (needs to be killed from a console) just by activating the
KDE blank screen screensaver with the following kernel configuration
options:
# CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y
CONFIG_HIGHMEM=y
CONFIG_HIGHIO=y
Other processes (command line) do fail too in this case (e.g. ls) with
the same ldt kernel message. The system is not loaded (about 110 to 120
processes) and mostly idle when this problem occurs.
The system consists of: AMD XP2400+/Asus A7V8X/1GB DDR (PC266).
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Andreas Steinmetz