Re: kernel panic, zone kalloc.8192 exhaustion

[Igor Khavkine]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 01:13:08AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> with the proc bug fix, the Hurd core is very stable.  In fact, I had an
> uptime of 16 hours, and handled over 100000 processes over all.
> 
> Then it crashed with
> 
> panic: zalloc: zone kalloc.8192 exhausted
> 
> The question that arises is, if there is some sort of leak (and which type
> of leak could this be), or if the zone limits are simply too small for
> todays machine.  Maybe even both is true.  The reason why I find a leak is
> possible is that I was not adding a lot of load at the time I got the panic,
> but maybe it is also some other, more subtle problem.

Zones are supposed to grow dynamically if the initial size is not
sufficient. kalloc zones definitely should grow dynamically since they
don't have the ZONE_FIXED flag. So if zalloc panics, that means it's
ran out of virtual memory (RAM+swap). And that's probably because there's
a leak somewhere in the kernel.

Igor