potential malloc problem with recent ATA commits ?

[Pascal Hofstee]

Hi,

Since i recently updated my CURRENT system from a March 26 build to a
fresh CURRENT i noticed that after a while the system seems to run
itself into a state wherein it is entirely out of memory.

The problem has presented itself so far during the last couple of days
when i come back home from a day at college to find the console
spewing tons of messages about (iirc) ata3/ata6 being unable to alloc
memory, shell processes that were still running being unable to fork
new processes because of memory shortage etc.

The system in question is an AMD Athlon64 3800+ using an MSI K9N-Neo
(nVidia MPC55-based) mainboard, with 2 GB RAM and 4 GB SWAP space.

The system has been running fine on the March 26 kernel but so far both
an April 12 as well as an April 16 kernel seem to exhibit the memory
problems.

Considering a large batch of changes to the ATA system seem to have
been commited around April 10th and a.o. the console spamming about
ata-subsystem components having malloc problems i was wondering if
perhaps the recent ATA changesets might be responsible for this
behaviour.

Any suggestions on how to proceed from here ?

With kind regards,
  Pascal Hofstee