Avery Pennarun writes:
> I recently installed Linux 1.3.37 on my tape backup system (486-33,
> 5 megs ram), an upgrade from my previous Linux 1.2.13.
^^^^^^
Ouch!
> Not particularly to my surprise (I read the linux-kernel and linux-tape
> mailing lists) I found that 1.3.37 no longer has an ftape option. Okay, I
> applied the patch to ftape-2.03b that appeared a while back, and voila...
> ftape.o wouldn't load!
> The log messages I get indicate that it's dynamically allocating the first
> two DMA buffers without trouble, but can't get the third. ftape will load
> on another system (16 megs ram) just fine - even though there's no tape
> drive.
> >From the shift-scroll-lock output, it seems that I have plenty of RAM left
> (relatively - this computer DOES only have 5 megs, after all) but it's in
> tiny chunks of 4 or 8k, for the most part, with one big 64k block. It's my
> understanding that ftape allocates 32k in each block, so it makes sense from
> this that it would only get the first two.
You're right about ftape alloc'ing the buffers as 32K chunks. It's a
real pain that ftape needs the buffers this way, but I'm afraid that
rewriting ftape to allocate 4K blocks (or whatever the page size is)
could be even worse.
> So, I wrote a program which allocates 5 megs of memory, and ran that one -
> this cleared just about everything out of memory, and left me with just
> enough big blocks to load ftape successfully. I'm running a backup now, and
> it seems to be fine.
Yup. A kluge, but it works. Another solution could be to upgrade
your system to 8 Meg ram. But your wallet might not be prepared for
that :-/
(PS: what happend to linux-kernel-digest? I have checked the list,
but I haven't seen a digest in ages)
Kai
- --
Kai Harrekilde-Petersen <khp@pip.dknet.dk> Linux: choice of a GNU generation
>> Inside every little problem there's a BIG problem, struggling to get out <<
PGP Key fingerprint = F6 33 E0 4E 01 17 85 8C 4F 7F 1F F8 14 E7 86 1D
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2
iQCVAgUBMKDg5uIL8NbSzfiVAQEG8gP/ZzjmFKBm0wGkwqoz9ugFg+3pNKQu0BZH
cPUWoDlhXp1jvd4WWbZ8nJg9O+WDXXYx5wwIFnERQIDF9VVor60WztHEVgL6k+hn
DuclDPOX0urF+smcJIotfc98ADIdxN1T0DtOPiNXR4Rbrer/h379l5/fYJYqo4iK
7y5BfQlLSRs=
=mVYE
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----