Re: kernel: st: Can't allocate new tape buffer (nbr 0)

Rik van Riel (riel@humbolt.geo.uu.nl)
Thu, 7 Jan 1999 17:56:11 +0100 (CET)

On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, Thomas Lakofski wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> > > Jan 6 04:30:01 oi kernel: No tape buffers allocated at initialization.
> > > Jan 6 04:30:01 oi kernel: st: Can't allocate new tape buffer (nbr 0).
> > > Jan 6 04:30:01 oi kernel: Detected scsi tape st0 at scsi0, channel 0, id
> > > 2, lun 0
> >
> > Memory fragmentation. You can work around it by quitting
> > Netscape or doing something else that frees up a ton of
> > memory.
>
> Hmmm... This is my primary mail/dns/www/everything-on-the-net
> server, it runs headless on another continent, so no netscape.
> Would running something like memtest to grab a chunk of memory and
> then release it just before the backup starts help?

Sure, that would do the trick just fine. I recall the
ftape package (when it was distributed separately from
the kernel) having a program just to do that :)

> Another thought -- if you push most of the software on the machine
> into swap by grabbing RAM with memtest, when it gets paged back in
> will it be defragmented at all?

It probably will because the buddy allocator usually does
quite a reasonable job of keeping a few large memory areas
free. Only in extreme situations it can fail and then we
have no way of restoring the memory to a 'normal' state...

cheers,

Rik -- If a Microsoft product fails, who do you sue?
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