> BUT NOW I have "Couldn't get a free page....." messages from the kernel...
> and I can do nothing in seconds sometimes. my shell gets locked, kernel gets
> out of memory and give "Cannot allocate memory" messages...
If this is a recent Linux kernel, it is a potentially survivable
error resulting from a sudden burst of requests for kernel memory.
Unfortunately, a lot of the device drivers, etc. that get this
condition don't expect it, and it is followed by an Oops for a
null pointer dereference.
It likely indicates that you are trying to run on too small a machine,
or with too many pages locked into memory.
You can sometimes get round it by updating the contents of
/proc/sys/freepages (see kernel sources for details), so as to force
the kernel to try to keep more pages free in the steady state.
I assume you are running with the cache on a Linux native partition,
as, for 2.0.30 kernels, at least, the (V)FAT filesystem support is
prone to running out of memory in this way.
-- David Woolley - Office: David Woolley <djw@bts.co.uk> BTS Home: <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk> Wallington TQ 2887 6421 England 51 21' 44" N, 00 09' 01" W (WGS 84)Received on Tue Dec 15 1998 - 10:27:33 MST
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