Jesse Brandeburg wrote:

On 10/23/05, Robert Hancock [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

John Bäckstrand wrote:

quoted

Im seeing a massive amount of page allocation failures with 2.6.14-rc5,
and also earlier kernels, see "E1000 - page allocation failure - saga

[snip]

quoted

It looks like you have enough memory free - the problem is that the
driver is allocating a block of memory with order 3, which is 8 pages.
Quite likely there are not enough contiguous free pages to satisfy that.

That's an awful big buffer size for a packet - I assume you're using
jumbo frames or something? Ideally the driver and hardware should be
able to allocate a buffer for those packets in multiple chunks, but I
have no idea if this is possible.

the latest e1000 driver (6.2.15) from http://sf.net/projects/e1000
fixes this by using multiple descriptors for jumbo frames, therefore
only doing order 0 (single page) page allocations.

let us know how it goes.

BTW why is this so much more common with recent kernels?

I don't know why it's more common, but I agree that it seems so. I have 
speculated that it may be related to 4k stack, but I can't even generate 
a credible wild-ass guess on that, much less find any evidence, so I 
doubt that's much if any correlation.

Getting memory a page at a time is ugly, but it will probably work just 
fine.

-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me