mdconfig unable to allocate memory

[Chris Elsworth]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 02:31:37PM +0100, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
> Chris Elsworth <chris at shagged.org> writes:
> > this fails:
> > cluestick# mdconfig -a -t malloc -o reserve -s 1g
> > mdconfig: ioctl(/dev/mdctl): Cannot allocate memory
> 
> it tries to allocate 1 GB of non-pageable kernel memory.  Use -t swap
> instead of -t malloc.

Hello,

Thanks for the reply. Is creating 1GB of non-pageable memory not
possible then? Even if I explicitly give the kernel far more than that
to play with?

I've recently been trying to fiddle with KVA_PAGES etc on 5.2.1 but
not really getting very far. It seems to be a bit of a black art. An
out of the box 5.2.1-RELEASE on a machine with 4GB of memory is giving
kmem_map panic errors from "vinum start" on a clean boot.  Some
Googling suggests raising KVA_PAGES and VM_KMEM_SIZE_MAX.  So I set
those to 512 and (1024*1024*1024) respectively, and that's killed the
machine; it hasn't come back from a remote reboot, but I suspect init
is dying and forcing a reboot loop. I'll be able to check that in a
few hours when I get home.

So, in short, is there any rule of thumb to follow when tweaking these
settings? It's a bit worrying that an out of the box 5.2.1 managed to
crash at all.

-- 
Chris