LinuxQuestions.org - Random restarts, and possible memory leak (0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0) )

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Random restarts, and possible memory leak (0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0) )

Slackware 10.2.0 (32-bit) on an AMD 64-bit 3800+.

I've been having frequent (every couple of days, continuous running) PC crashes lately, and it's starting to irritate me. Video (graphics, window refreshes, workspace switching) gets slow and stuttery, and finally the screen goes black. Mouse and keyboard become unresponsive (no ctrl+alt+backspace), and it stays that way 'til I hard reset it. At first I suspected my video card, which is a PCI-E GeForce something or other, as it usually crashed when I had World of Warcraft running via Cedega, but now I'm not so sure...

It just did it a couple of minutes ago, with nothing more running than Windowmaker, a few shells, Firefox, Gaim, Xmms, and opensshd in the background. /var/log/messages has this to say:

Code:

Jul 23 21:04:24 cleopatra -- MARK --

Jul 23 21:19:31 cleopatra kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0)

Jul 23 21:23:39 cleopatra syslogd 1.4.1: restart.

Jul 23 21:23:40 cleopatra kernel: klogd 1.4.1, log source = /proc/kmsg started.

Jul 23 21:23:40 cleopatra kernel: BIOS-provided physical RAM map:

Jul 23 21:23:40 cleopatra kernel: 896MB LOWMEM available.

Jul 23 21:23:40 cleopatra kernel: Initializing CPU#0

Jul 23 21:23:40 cleopatra kernel: Memory: 904376k/917504k available (1832k kernel cod                e, 12740k reserved, 607k data, 120k init, 0k highmem)

According to Google, that's basically "You're out of memory somewhere." So what I want to know is, what are the chances that this is based somewhere in hardware/drivers, or is it purely software and I should suck it up and upgrade to Slack 11 now?

Thanks!

It's very hard to say. I'd start from the software, however. It may be simply a buggy app that consumes the whole memory in certain situation. To find out what's going on will require you to monitor the memory usage. A simple script that will save an output of ps aux to file every minute or so should be enough. Of maybe, when you notice the slowness, you will be able to get to a terminal and run ps aux.

Ugh. Unfortunately, it just did it again:

Code:

Jul 30 09:43:40 cleopatra -- MARK --

Jul 30 10:03:40 cleopatra -- MARK --

Jul 30 10:23:40 cleopatra -- MARK --

Jul 30 10:43:40 cleopatra -- MARK --

Jul 30 10:55:28 cleopatra kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2                      /0)

Jul 30 10:57:10 cleopatra syslogd 1.4.1: restart.

Jul 30 10:57:11 cleopatra kernel: klogd 1.4.1, log source = /proc/kmsg started.

This time, with no warning whatsoever, and no abnormal memory usage showing up on my system monitor. I'll just reinstall the whole thing in a few days (now's not really a good time). Thanks, Mara!