Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751606AbXAZVhN (ORCPT ); Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:37:13 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751612AbXAZVhN (ORCPT ); Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:37:13 -0500 Received: from zcars04e.nortel.com ([47.129.242.56]:41756 "EHLO zcars04e.nortel.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751606AbXAZVhM (ORCPT ); Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:37:12 -0500 Message-ID: <45BA747F.8040005@nortel.com> Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 15:37:03 -0600 From: "Chris Friesen" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2-6 (X11/20050513) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mel Gorman CC: Christoph Lameter , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/8] Allow huge page allocations to use GFP_HIGH_MOVABLE References: <20070125234458.28809.5412.sendpatchset@skynet.skynet.ie> <20070125234558.28809.21103.sendpatchset@skynet.skynet.ie> <45BA49F2.2000804@nortel.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jan 2007 21:37:07.0770 (UTC) FILETIME=[20FB01A0:01C74192] Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1369 Lines: 31 Mel Gorman wrote: > On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, Chris Friesen wrote: >> We currently see this issue on our systems, as we have older e1000 >> hardware with 9KB jumbo frames. After a while we just fail to >> allocate buffers and the system goes belly-up. > Can you describe a reliable way of triggering this problem? At best, I > hear "on our undescribed workload, we sometimes see this problem" but > not much in the way of details. I work on embedded server applications. One of our blades is a dual-Xeon with 8GB of RAM and 6 e1000 cards. The hardware is 32-bit only, so we're using the i386 kernel with HIGHMEM64G enabled. This blade acts essentially as storage for other blades in the shelf. Basically all disk and network I/O. After being up for a month or two it starts getting e1000 allocation failures. In some of the cases at least it appears that the page cache has hundreds of megs of freeable memory, but it can't get at that memory to fulfill an atomic allocation. I should point out that we haven't yet tried tuning /proc/sys/vm/min_free_kbytes. The default value on this system is 3831. Chris - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/