2.0.28: Couldn't get a free page

Jason Merrill (jason@cygnus.com)
26 Feb 1997 17:52:28 -0800

I'm running 2.0.28 on a P133 from Micron. Periodically things will
freeze up during heavy disk activity, usually involving a compile. My
shells and xterms keep working, but I can't even run ps until it
unfreezes. By unsetting LD_LIBRARY_PATH and running /usr/bin/tail
/var/log/messages, I can see that the kernel is complaining that it
"Couldn't get a free page". The computer has 32MB RAM and 96MB swap, of
which about 80MB is usually free, so it's not running low on space; why is
the kernel having so much trouble?

I used to run into this on 2.0.23, and thought it was related to NFS,
perhaps amd's repeated mounting and unmounting, but now it seems unrelated.
There have only been four amd mounts today, the last one an hour before
this latest episode of kernel confusion. The compiles are using local disk.

Any ideas? This makes it hard to get work done.

Jason