Subject: Re: USB drives, contiguous kernel memory.
To: None <netbsd-help@netbsd.org>
From: Jonathan A. Kollasch <jakollasch@mcleodusa.net>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 07/05/2005 19:50:08
On Tuesday 05 July 2005 04:30 pm, Richard Rauch wrote:
> I seem to recall that someone had a way to do it just via dd from/to
> a suitable source, or creating a large enough file and doing something
> trivial with it.  But that could be a bogus memory.

#!/bin/sh
ulimit -d 2000000
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=128m count=1
#end

this is on a 1/4GiB box (with 3/4G swap)
The general idea is to force a large allocation that then gets freed.

This also works with my ath(4) card when on inserting it it errors:
ath%d: failed to allocate descriptors: %d

I would like to see the underlying issue resolved (not hacked) so that any 
kernel memory allocation can rearrange RAM to make necessary space available.

	Jonathan Kollasch