Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753912Ab0HWWfx (ORCPT ); Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:35:53 -0400 Received: from mo-65-41-216-221.sta.embarqhsd.net ([65.41.216.221]:50577 "EHLO greer.hardwarefreak.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753022Ab0HWWfw (ORCPT ); Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:35:52 -0400 Message-ID: <4C72F7C6.3020109@hardwarefreak.com> Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:35:50 -0500 From: Stan Hoeppner User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100711 Thunderbird/3.0.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Pekka Enberg CC: Christoph Lameter , Mikael Abrahamsson , Linux Kernel List , linux-mm@kvack.org, Mel Gorman Subject: Re: 2.6.34.1 page allocation failure References: <4C70BFF3.8030507@hardwarefreak.com> <4C724141.8060000@kernel.org> In-Reply-To: <4C724141.8060000@kernel.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1421 Lines: 35 Pekka Enberg put forth on 8/23/2010 4:37 AM: > On 8/23/10 1:40 AM, Christoph Lameter wrote: >> On Sun, 22 Aug 2010, Pekka Enberg wrote: >> >>> In Stan's case, it's a order-1 GFP_ATOMIC allocation but there are >>> only order-0 pages available. Mel, any recent page allocator fixes in >>> 2.6.35 or 2.6.36-rc1 that Stan/Mikael should test? >> This is the TCP slab? Best fix would be in the page allocator. However, >> in this particular case the slub allocator would be able to fall back to >> an order 0 allocation and still satisfy the request. >> > Looking at the stack trace of the oops, I think Stan has CONFIG_SLAB > which doesn't have order-0 fallback. That is correct. The menuconfig help screen led me to believe the SLAB allocator was the "safe" choice: "CONFIG_SLAB: The regular slab allocator that is established and known to work well in all environments" Should I be using SLUB instead? Any downsides to SLUB on an old and slow (500 MHz) single core dual CPU box with <512MB RAM? Also, what is the impact of these oopses? Despite the entries in dmesg, the system "seems" to be running ok. Or is this simply the calm before the impending storm? -- Stan -- 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/