On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 11:16 +0000, Anton Ivanov wrote: > Package: linux-2.6 > Version: 2.6.32-30~bpo50+1 > Severity: normal > > > I keep getting VM failure messages. I suspect the machine > is simply a bit too slow for the network card which is in > it. It is a via Nehemia at 1.7GHz with an extra Intel > GigE server adapter. The backtraces look like showing > problems in the network receive/xmit routines.
This is an allocation failure for a *huge* allocation (order 5 = 128 KB chunk) in atomic (non-sleeping) context. I think this may be related to (1) use of GRO on the receive path to coalesce packets (2) a netfilter/iptables rule that requires the packet to be duplicated, or requires the contents to be made contiguous. > The machine is swapless and is used mostly as an NFS > server. It was not showing this behaviour under 2.6.26 [...] Probably because e1000 did not use LRO or GRO there. You can test this by turning off GRO with 'ethtool -K eth0 gro off'. However I would also recommend configuring the machine with some swap space. The kernel has trouble defragmenting memory without swapping. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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