On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Tejun Heo wrote: > > You pushed your box really hard and the kernel can't get the memory it wants. > Not really relevant to SATA problem. And it's not even really a bug - the caller is supposed to be ok with it. It's a warning message that the kernel spits out just because we've had problems in the past with callers that did _not_ handle an allocation error gracefully, so the warnign is spit out to (a) let us know something happened and (b) if there's a subsequent oops due to dereferencing a NULL pointer, it becomes easier to pinpoint what the sequence of events was. So it's an atomic allocation that happens on the receive path in the network when you've run out of pages (because you're getting enough network traffic that earlier receives have used up all buffers, and so much disk IO that we haven't had time to clean any new pages yet), and getting an allocation failure there really is "normal", it's just "very unusual". So that particular dump _looks_ scary, but it happens to be totally a non-issue unless something else happens afterwards to imply that the caller had trouble with the allocation failure. It's also a sign of trouble if you can trigger it _easily_. It should be something that only triggers under very high load and under unusual circumstances. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
