Im seeing a massive amount of page allocation failures with 2.6.14-rc5, and also earlier kernels, see "E1000 - page allocation failure - saga continues :(". Machine is a 1Ghz Athlon with 256MB RAM. Attached is example dmesg output. The stack traces come in many variants. Killing processes using RAM only seems to help temporarily. Ive also tried setting vm.min_free_kbytes=16384, which used to work pretty well, but this does not help (atleast not in the state the machine is currently in, without rebooting).
free currently gives:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 256520 239128 17392 0 5372 67500
-/+ buffers/cache: 166256 90264
Swap: 506036 21248 484788
I havent yet tried rebooting and using the vm.min_free_kbytes=16384 from scratch, but I think something with the default for this is wrong if it results in this many page allocation errors. The machine is serving files from an encrypted partition with reiserfs on it, and I obivously use the e1000 driver.
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John Bäckstrand
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[149649.847890] kcryptd/0: page allocation failure. order:3, mode:0x20
[149649.849933] Free pages: 16148kB (0kB HighMem)