*BSD News Article 10155


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From: tjw00@zombie.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Tom Wye)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: [386BSD] Panic kmem_malloc
Message-ID: <0drC02d633xt01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com>
Date: 20 Jan 93 00:33:46 GMT
References: <107311@bu.edu> <1j9aviINN9h7@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>
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|> In article <107311@bu.edu> heiser@acs.bu.edu (Bill Heiser) writes:

|> [stuff deleted...[
|> >src to the unix commands.  Partway through the unpacking
|> >(I did "cat src01.*|uncompress|cpio -icdvum"), about where it
|> >was extracting stuff to usr/src/obj, the system paniced as follows:
|> >
|> >Panic:  kmem_malloc: kmem_map too small
|> >
|> >Is this a known problem?  Any work-around so I can get the
|> >srcdist unpacked?
|> >
|> 
|> 
|>   I had precisely the same error yesterday afternoon.  It was the first time
|> in a month that I had the system crash on its own.  I was doing a ping, and
|> had two users logged  in through the network.  No one was doing anything
|> unusual.
|> 
|>   Except for the fact that our hardware is completely different, and I have
|> installed all of the pertinent patches, our systems are similar.
|> 
|>   I will be digging into this over the weekend, but if anyone can offer an
|> explanation of what causes it, maybe we can search for a solution.

I have had this problem too but on compiles of X11R5 and then during the make 
install process of X11R5. At the time I had the kernel configurated as a 2 user kernel			 
when I increased the number of users to 10 in the config file the problem goes
away. At this point with the GENERICISA config file set to 10 users I have not
experienced kmem_melloc panics. When the kernel is set for only 2 users I get a
panic ever time (one hours into the compile of X11R5). It's happens even faster on
the install of X11R5 (i.e., make install') within  2-5 minutes the system panics.
I have the patch kit installed and the system has 16 megabytes of memory!