Re: 2.0.31-pre9 -- floppy0: Unable to allocate DMA memory

Daniel Ryde (ryde@tripnet.se)
Tue, 16 Sep 1997 09:30:11 +0200 (CEST)

On 15 Sep 1997, Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:
> Since 2.0.30 I've been seeing:
>
> Sep 15 08:14:07 bittersweet kernel: Sound error: Couldn't allocate DMA buffer
>
> ... after I patched up to pre-9, It stopped happening as often, but
> still does after a while.
>
> total used free shared buffers cached
> Mem: 63496 60912 2584 19208 1328
> -/+ buffers: 59584 1256
> Swap: 122968 42876 80092 10564
>
> It's using a lot more swap than I think it should too. Perhaps
> there's a memory leak? Also, why isn't there a number under "cached"
> anymore? There used to be... and it shows up in `top' still. Odd.

My system was not memory starved. Well, something similar to:
$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 63284 62572 712 42668 13340 21868
-/+ buffers: 27364 35920
Swap: 48380 0 48380

If you system is swapping that much then you must have some problem.
Check your running processes and their memory consumption.
You might also check your procps package. I had some similar problem when
using Debian procps v1.12.2 that gave wierd results. I downgraded to
v1.11.6 to get it right. But I don't use the 'hamm' development releases
at all, so it might not work for you.

Best Regards

Daniel Ryde, System Administrator
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