Re: 2.0.31-pre9 -- floppy0: Unable to allocate DMA memory

Daniel Ryde (ryde@tripnet.se)
Sat, 13 Sep 1997 18:01:06 +0200 (CEST)

SL Baur wrote:
> It appears I'm stuck. This is a server (not the same machine I
> previously reported a problem with -- that machine is fine now) with
> 64MB of RAM which just got upgraded to 2.0.31-pre9 about an hour
> previously.
>
> # superformat /dev/fd0
> Formatting cylinder 62, head 0 format: Out of memory
>
> (At this point I cranked up the values in /proc/sys/vm/freepages by
> hand from the values given in Documentation/memory-tuning.txt).
>
> # free
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 63336 55160 8176 16976 13676 28868
> -/+ buffers/cache: 12616 50720
> Swap: 52380 0 52380
> # cat /proc/sys/vm/freepages
> 256 512 2048
>
> # superformat /dev/fd0
> open: No such device or address
>
> (And the error message in the Subject: appears in syslog).
>
> This is the first kernel I've ever built for this machine that has the
> floppy disk driver _built in_ (not a module). Should that make a
> difference? How do I recover from this?

Similar thing occured to me. I had compiled a new kernel and was about to
dd it to a floppy. And I recieved the same error message (may not be
exactly as I might remember wrong):

$ dd if=zImage of=/dev/fd0
No such device or address
$ mdir
No such device or address
$ cp junk /dev/fd0
No such device or address

And looking into the syslog I notice the same DMA errors:
Sep 12 17:46:45 foo kernel: floppy0: Unable to allocate DMA memory
Sep 12 17:47:08 foo kernel: floppy0: Unable to allocate DMA memory
Sep 12 17:49:02 foo kernel: floppy0: Unable to allocate DMA memory

I had to reboot to get it to work again.

This is Kernel 2.0.31pre9, no modules, Using Debian 1.3.1.
P166MMX/64Mb ASUS.

Best Regards

Daniel Ryde, System Administrator
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