Re: 2.2.1-ac5 oops with many fd

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Mon, 15 Feb 1999 18:18:07 +0000 (GMT)


> there is a lot of I/O and then kmalloc returns NULL. I'll try adding a
> spinlock
> around the kmalloc so it can't call it while other stuff is going on.

The I/O drives down the free pages enough probably.

You can't spinlock around the kmalloc either. The kmalloc may cause I/O
requests to be queued to enable kmalloc to complete..

> I actually only need it in 136 byte chunks, the only place I got 8k from was
> that's
> about how much had been allocated total when kmalloc started failing. But I
> think it's probably due to reading/writing from it during allocation.

Allocating over a page size significantly increases the change of failure
because its guaranteed physically linear - so will cause swapping

Alan

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