Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 12 Apr 2003 20:04:44 +0530 | From | "Sriram Narasimhan" <> | Subject | Problems in kernel memory allocation |
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Hi,
I am having problems allocating more than 2.5 MB in the linux kernel. I am using Linux 2.4.7-10 RH 7.2 on i386.
Physical RAM: 64 MB
I tried two methods of allocation, one using kmalloc and other using kmem_cache_alloc. Both of them failed to allocate more than 2.5 MB. (GFP_KERNEL / GFP_ATOMIC operations) When I run 'free' I am able to see that the free physical memory is about 4MB and the free buffers/cache is about 52 MB. The report is as follows: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 62264 57928 4336 0 30152 17768 -/+ buffers/cache: 10008 52256 Swap: 192772 0 192772
I also found out that the /proc/meminfo had about 43MB of Inact_dirty . Is there any way to forcefully flush the dirty buffers ? Why is the allocation consistently failing in about 2.5 or 3MB ? Only when the free physical is about 30MB and I start allocating am I able to successfully allocate about 5MB.
Is there a restriction as to how much memory you can allocate in the kernel ?
Sriram
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