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Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 21:04:12 +0100
From: Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>
To: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: orf@mailbag.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, brownfld@irridia.com,
        andrea@suse.de, akpm@zip.com.au
Subject: Re: 2.4.16 memory badness (reproducible)
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On Tue, 11 Dec 2001 19:07:41 +0000 (GMT)
Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> wrote:

> I believe this error comes, not from a (genuine or mistaken) shortage
> of free memory,

Me, too. 

> but from shortage or fragmentation of vmalloc's virtual
> address space.  Does patch below (to 2.4.17-pre4-aa1 since I think that's
> what you tried last; easily adaptible to other trees) doubling vmalloc's
> address space (on your 1GB machine or larger) make any difference?
> Perhaps there's a vmalloc leak and this will only delay the error.

At least I think this direction to search the bug looks a lot more promising than a general mem shortage problem. After reviewing modify_ldt this looked like the only useable idea to Leighs problem.

Regards,
Stephan


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