2.0.23: Couldn't get a free page

Jason Merrill (jason@cygnus.com)
12 Nov 1996 00:35:28 -0800

I've been having troubles with the 2.0.x series of kernels; I think this
problem appeared late in 1.3, but I'm not sure. The symptoms are that
after the system has been up for a while, NFS starts to fail; reads and
writes hang for long periods. The message 'Couldn't get a free page'
appears in the syslog. This gets gradually worse until the system
becomes unusable. I use amd; perhaps the repeated mounting and unmounting
is hitting a resource leak.

A log exerpt, from the beginning of the end...

Nov 11 01:01:59 yorick amd[16718]: deneb:/deneb/tfm mounted fstype nfs on /amd/deneb/deneb/tfm
Nov 11 01:02:26 yorick kernel: nfs_stat_to_errno: bad nfs status return value: 116
Nov 11 01:04:00 yorick kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
Nov 11 01:04:49 yorick kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
Nov 11 01:05:44 yorick last message repeated 5 times
Nov 11 01:05:53 yorick kernel: NFS server cygint not responding, still trying.
Nov 11 01:05:54 yorick kernel: Couldn't get a free page.....
Nov 11 01:06:34 yorick last message repeated 4 times
Nov 11 01:07:34 yorick last message repeated 6 times
Nov 11 01:08:04 yorick last message repeated 3 times

Any thoughts?

Jason