[OpenAFS] Re: Strange problem with OpenAFS on Virtual Machine

[Derrick Brashear]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jul 2010 11:09:36 -0400
> Derrick Brashear <shadow@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > allocation failed: out of vmalloc space - use vmalloc=<size> to
>> > increase size.
>>
>> well, i don't know *why* this would be the case, unless the vmalloc
>> arena is more fragmented in this case.
>
> Google suggests you can get considerably less available vmalloc space if
> you have more RAM in the machine... I have no idea why.
>
> Claudio, if you 'cat /proc/meminfo', I think the VmallocTotal line will
> tell you how much 'vmalloc' memory is available on the machine, which is
> the type of memory used by the afs memcache. When you boot with 1G of
> ram, it's probably around 100M; with 700M, it's probably over 200M. If
> your configured cache size is over or around 100M, that would explain
> it. If you want a cache that large... as derrick says, "use
> vmalloc=<size>" as it tells you.
>
> Could we not just try to kmalloc if vmalloc fails repeatedly?

we don't elsewhere allocate sizes > PAGESIZE from kmalloc, and this
definitely would be.