[realtek] ..rtl8139...annoying consistant madness about memory squeeze..

[Donald Becker]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Fruitbat wrote:
>               I am having this consistant and persistant problem with
> rtl8139, wherein it gets the wobblies and starts barfing;
> 
> Memory squeeze ; packet deferred

As you guessed, this message happens when the kernel won't give the driver
any memory to receive packets into.
The driver attempts to survive by saving the packets in the local Rx ring
memory, but there is only 32KB or 64KB.  Eventually the chip will stop.

> ...all over the console. I'm totally unprepared with the nitty-gritty of
> it, I thought I'd hit the list first. I found one reference to this
> problem, suggesting it was a issue with ram (or lack there-of) , so
> promptly gave the machines more ram than they know what to do with...and
> the problem persists. If the problem does manifest itself (and there

What kernel are you running?  Some older kernels had a problem with not
keeping enough available memory around, even when they had plenty of swap
space.

BTW, you do have swap space, right?  When this happens, do you still have
available swap space?

> >seems< to be no specific pattern), it will turn the linux box to jello
>and need the big hurl reboot to regain sanity. The machines are all squid
>cache proxy boxes...no two are exactly the same hardware wise, I believe I
>have observed it with 2.2.14~>.16 .

Hmmm, those kernels shouldn't have the old problem.  Check your swap space,
and look for processes running wild.


Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Beowulf Clusters / Linux Installations
Annapolis MD 21403