Console freeze: diagnostic

Mathieu Guillaume (mat@via.ecp.fr)
Sun, 9 Nov 1997 10:38:48 +0100 (CET)

Well, I've finally managed to make SysReq work (I've moved it to F9, for
some reason it didn't like being on PrintScreen).
The console freeze turns out to be something several people have already
encountered, namely a problem with the network buffer allocations (even
though it's only the loopback interface).

Here is the part of the memory info that I was able to get:
(This is on a machine with 16MB RAM and 28MB swap)
The only thing that changed between one 'Show memory info' and the other
was the number of failed network buffer allocs.

Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Free pages: 196kB
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: ( 43*4kB 3*8kB 0*16kB 0*32kB 0*64kB 0*128kB =
196kB)
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Swap cache: add 502/502, delete 127533/324,
find 1541/0
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Free swap: 27232kB
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: 4096 pages of RAM
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: 148 free pages
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: 422 reserved pages
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: 1185 pages shared
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Buffer memory: 104kB
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Buffer heads: 140
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Buffer blocks: 104
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: CLEAN: 60 buffers, 21 used (last=21), 0
locked, 0 protected, 0 dirty
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: LOCKED: 15 buffers, 15 used (last=15), 0
locked, 0 protected, 0 dirty
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: DIRTY: 15 buffers, 5 used (last=6), 0
locked, 0 protected, 15 dirty
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Networking buffers in use : 137
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Total network buffer allocations : 8198
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: Total failed network buffer allocs : 23326660
Nov 9 10:27:33 mat kernel: IP fragment buffer size : 0