Justin Piszcz wrote:
> Kernel 2.6.9 w/TSO patch.
> 
> (most likely do to the e1000/nic/issue)
> 
> $ dmesg
> gaim: page allocation failure. order:4, mode:0x21
>  [<c01391a7>] __alloc_pages+0x247/0x3b0
>  [<c0139328>] __get_free_pages+0x18/0x40
>  [<c035c33a>] sound_alloc_dmap+0xaa/0x1b0
>  [<c03648c0>] ad_mute+0x20/0x40
>  [<c035c70f>] open_dmap+0x1f/0x100
>  [<c035cb58>] DMAbuf_open+0x178/0x1d0
>  [<c035a4fa>] audio_open+0xba/0x280
>  [<c015d863>] cdev_get+0x53/0xc0
>  [<c035968c>] sound_open+0xac/0x110
>  [<c035898e>] soundcore_open+0x1ce/0x300
>  [<c03587c0>] soundcore_open+0x0/0x300
>  [<c015d524>] chrdev_open+0x104/0x250
>  [<c015d420>] chrdev_open+0x0/0x250
>  [<c0152d82>] dentry_open+0x1d2/0x270
>  [<c0152b9c>] filp_open+0x5c/0x70
>  [<c01049c8>] common_interrupt+0x18/0x20
>  [<c0152e75>] get_unused_fd+0x55/0xf0
>  [<c0152fd9>] sys_open+0x49/0x90
>  [<c010405b>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb

Ouch, 64K atomic DMA allocation.

The DMA zone barely even keeps that much total memory free.

The caller probably wants fixing, but you could try this patch...