NOTICE: getcpages - waiting for 1 contiguous pages

[Bill Heiser]

In article <1991Jun15.205327.10904 at turnkey.tcc.com> jackv at turnkey.TCC.COM (Jack F. Vogel) writes:
>In article <1991Jun14.202957.1408 at hawkmoon.MN.ORG> det at hawkmoon.MN.ORG (Derek E. Terveer) writes:
>|My machine has been crashing at least once per day with the following panic
>|which is preceded by a number of NOTICEs.  I am not sure what the getcpages
>|message indicates other than the obvious; that somewhere the kernel required
>|at least one page of contiguous "memory".  And because it was in swap (and

>Sorry, you are wrong. This stack trace shows that it is the pager "vhand"
>that is running, and what it is doing is stealing unreferenced pages and

I'm seeing these "can't get x contiguous pages" too.  The machine hasn't
been panicing as described above ... but I've been seeing some strange
hangs lately -- like only the past couple of weeks!  One symptom I've
seen a couple of times is that one of the modems stops showing 
DSR (I think that's the one, forget offhand;  in any case, the getting
can't be killed and the port is INOP.    If I try a second time to kill
the getty, the machine hangs rock solid right after hitting return on
the kill -9 command.  It requires a cold system reset.

This is what "crash" shows right now:


# crash
dumpfile = /dev/mem, namelist = /unix, outfile = stdout
> panic
System Messages:

total real mem  = 7995392
total avail mem = 5361664

ESIX System 5.3.2 Rev.D

Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988 AT&T
Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corp.
Copyright (c) 1988, 1989, 1990 Everex Systems Inc.
All Rights Reserved


FAS 2.08.0 async driver: Unit 0-5 init state is [******]


WARNING: Excessive modem status interrupts on FAS unit 3 (check the cabling).

NOTICE: getcpages - waiting for 1 contiguous pages


No Panic
> quit

script done on Sat Jun 15 22:12:35 1991


The "modem status interrupts" happened after one of the serial
ports hung and I cycled power on the modem (this was a different
scenario than that described above) -- the modem reset cleared this
particular problem.  I have also seen the modem staus messages
when powering on a Microterm 5510 terminal I have configured on the
system with a null modem adapter (the terminal is acting up, I have
to poower cycle it sveral times to get it to come up).  (Sigh, so 
many problems :-(


p.s.  I've not seen the getcpages on the console.  Only crash
shows them.

This is bad.  Having to cold reset the machine usually requires 
booting from floppy to get the fs usable again.



-- 
bill at unixland.natick.ma.us     ...!uunet!think!unixland!bill
OR ..!uunet!world!unixland!bill     heiser at world.std.com
Public Access Unix 508-655-3848(2400)   508-651-8723(HST)  508-651-8733(PEP-V32)