Re: Page Allocation Failures Return With 2.6.9+TSO patch.

[Nick Piggin]

Justin Piszcz wrote:
> It does not seem like they do, but they cannot be good...

It seems almost inevitable that they'll happen, especially if a module
is loaded after boot (this is actually somewhere that incremental min
will help "echo some number > /proc/sys/vm/lower_zone_protection").

But from the code, the failures really won't hurt at all. It might
double the number of interrupts coming from your soundcard, but I
dare say you would never be able to notice a difference.

> I have applied the following patches
>
> 1] TSO patch
> 2] rollup.patch
>
> Rebooting now and will alert the list if/when I receive more page 
> allocation failures.
>
> FYI - I started getting these with 2.6.9.
>
> (However, it was always possible on the Dell Optiplex GX1 to create page 
> allocation failure with: ifconfig eth0 mtu 9000), however, on a 
> higher-end machine (2.6GHZ, 2GB ram, etc) ifconfig eth0 mtu 9000 worked 
> fine.
>
> Is it something with the architecture of the box bus/box?

No, probably just different configurations or memory usage patterns
of the kernel, maybe different drivers, etc.

> Why does it tend to affect one machine and not the other?

Again, luck of the draw mainly. My patch should definitely help the
TSO allocation failures (it probably won't fix the sound buffer alloc
failure though, now that I've looked at it).
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