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    Kstack allocation failed

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
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    • J Offline
      Juve
      last edited by

      Hi everybody,

      On a system having 25K states, after 5 hours I got kstack allocation failed and the WebGui is giving errors everywhere (cannont fork, division by zero) etc.

      HW is Dell r610 with 2 intel Xeon Quad core and 8 GB of RAM, broadcom NICs

      Release is 1.2.3 release

      Have you got a clue.

      Do we need to tune vm.kmem_size in the loader.conf ?

      Many thanks

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      • W Offline
        wallabybob
        last edited by

        My guess would be a kernel memory leak. What does pfSense call your NICs? (e.g. em0, bge1, bce2 etc)

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        • J Offline
          Juve
          last edited by

          bce0 to bce7

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          • W Offline
            wallabybob
            last edited by

            Another poster with the same system has reported (http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,29775.0.html) that the bce devices have a memory mapped register region of 32MB per device. If the device driver just blindly maps the whole region (I don't know if it needs to) then you will have 256MB of kernel virtual address space just for the device registers. That will probably leave "not very much" for other kernel purposes.

            The other poster reported two bce devices on the motherboard for a total of 10 which would mean even greater requirements for kernel memory.

            So, yes, you should probably substantially increase the size of kernel memory.

            And you would be better off moving to the 64-bit version of pfSense (not yet considered ready for production) as soon as you can so you can use all of that memory on the system. (You are unlikely to be using more than 3GB at present).

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            • J Offline
              Juve
              last edited by

              Many thanks for your reply. It is what I was thinking of.

              It is strange I made a search and did find this particular thread….

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