Re: New thread: page allocation failure with E1000 (seems to be reproducible)

[Jesse Brandeburg <jesse.brandeburg@gmail.com>]

in the future please copy netdev@vger.kernel.org on networking issues.

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Richard Hartmann
<richih.mailinglist@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Jesse,
>
>> the memory allocation (order:0), while unexpected, are not fatal, and
>> the e1000 driver is written to handle the failures during allocation.
>>
>> Does something else happen to the system after this or does operation continue?
>
> I can not be sure, but I _think_ some bogus data made it into userspace.
> I did have some binary in a text string I received & logged, which is a
> tad unusual.

hm, if that did occur it would be bad.  But it does sound like
operation continued, which is good.

>> You might be able to try the sysctl tweak to reserve a little more
>> memory for driver allocations.
>> # sysctl vm.min_free_kbytes
>> # sysctl -e vm.min_free_kbytes=<double what you have>
>
> I will try that, thanks.
>
>
>> have you increased the number of rx/tx descriptors in use by e1000?
>
> No. Should I?

I wouldn't recommend it if you're already having issues getting
order:0 allocations, it would just make the problem worse.  I wanted
to make sure you were not.

Jesse