On Thursday 12 June 2008 17:01:04 Pablo Neira Ayuso wrote: > >> Yes, very strange. ctnetlink is hitting ENOMEM, ie. it cannot create the > >> conntrack because there's no memory available. As for now ctnetlink is > >> allocating conntracks via nf_conntrack_alloc() which uses GFP_ATOMIC. > >> I'll send you a patch to relax this to check if that is the problem, > >> otherwise I think that the error is bogus. > >> > >>> Jun 11 15:40:07 fw1b conntrack-tools[13383]: committing external cache > >>> Jun 11 15:40:07 fw1b conntrack-tools[13383]: commit-create: Cannot > >>> allocate memory > >>> Jun 11 15:40:07 fw1b conntrack-tools[13383]: Committed 33 new entries > >>> Jun 11 15:40:07 fw1b conntrack-tools[13383]: 25 entries ignored, > >>> already exist Jun 11 15:40:07 fw1b conntrack-tools[13383]: 1 entries > >>> can't be committed > >> > >> What it is really annoying is the fact that you hit error with that less > >> entries. I cannot reproduce that in my testbed with ~20000 entries. Are > >> you using some kind of embedded device? Architecture? > > > > This is a vitual machine (i686) which 128 MByte of memory running under > > VMware server 1.0.4. > > Would you try this patch? Pablo, I tried to debug this a bit and added some printk()s in the ctnetlink_create_conntrack() function to find out where the ENOMEM is coming from: So, now I see that nf_conntrack_alloc() is not returning this error, but it is coming from a couple of lines below in the same function: helper = nf_ct_helper_find_get(rtuple); if (helper) { help = nf_ct_helper_ext_add(ct, GFP_KERNEL); if (help == NULL) { nf_ct_helper_put(helper); err = -ENOMEM; goto err; } There, nf_ct_helper_ext_add() returns NULL, which causes ENOMEM to be returned. I didn't debug this further because I'm rather lost in the code. But maybe this gives you some hint what's wrong. -Rainer -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netfilter-devel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html