On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 15:20 -0500, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote: > Hi Debian! > > In 2.6.9 I am seeing for the first time: > > debian kernel: realplay.bin: page allocation failure. order:4, mode:0x21 > > Followed by more messages mentioning modules. > > It does not seem to cause any noticable problem: realplay plays as usual. > > What is it? Anybody knows some details? > Yikes... a 64K atomic allocation request. This message is basically the kernel saying "sorry but I don't have the resources to complete your request". The problem is that the request is atomic (0x21) meaning the process cannot sleep so that the swapper can run and free up enough _contiguous_ pages. There is no real harm done and the process most likely falls back to a smaller request. You should repost this problem on the kernel mailing list and be sure to include the stack dump that followed the allocation failure. This problem was brought yesterday on the LKML and Nick submitted a patch fixing some TSO stuff dealing with large order allocations in interrupt context. Are you using TSO? Does the stack trace have a call to sound_alloc_dmap in it? It's relatively safe to say that there is no real harm here. Check yesterdays LKML archives for the full details and/or to post your problem on the correct list. -- Eric Gaumer <gaumerel@ecs.fullerton.edu>
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