Re: kernel: st: Can't allocate new tape buffer (nbr 0)

Kurt Garloff (K.Garloff@ping.de)
Sat, 9 Jan 1999 13:13:49 +0100

On Thu, Jan 07, 1999 at 04:37:13PM +0100, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > Jan 6 04:30:01 oi kernel: st0: Can't allocate tape buffer.
>
> Memory fragmentation. You can work around it by quitting
> Netscape or doing something else that frees up a ton of
> memory.
>
> Even a workaround where we reserve half a meg for DMA
> buffers is probably better than the current situation.

sg suffers the same problem. It tries to get a 32k buffer, SG_BIG_BUFF. Now,
if it's compiled as a module, it tries to grab 32k of continous mem, which
is likely to fail. I once created a patch to make it try 16k and 8k, if 32k
fails. It was straightforward ...

This still allowed CDA reading with cdda2wav without problems, as it
has the -n option, telling how many sectors should be read per request.

I don't have the patch here, it's at the university, so I cannot append it.
But tell me, if you're interested.

-- 
Kurt Garloff <kurt@garloff.de>                           [Dortmund, FRG]  
Plasma physics, high perf. computing              [Linux-ix86,-axp, DUX]
PGP key on http://www.garloff.de/kurt/        [Linux SCSI driver: DC390]


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