From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Oct 18 12:43:32 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 66EC837B401 for ; Fri, 18 Oct 2002 12:43:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 6BF6843EA9 for ; Fri, 18 Oct 2002 12:43:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from iedowse@maths.tcd.ie) Received: from walton.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 18 Oct 2002 20:43:27 +0100 (BST) To: Chris Ptacek Cc: "'freebsd-questions@freebsd.org'" Subject: Re: devbuf state in top In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 18 Oct 2002 13:11:54 EDT." <31269226357BD211979E00A0C9866DAB02BB99F1@rios.sitaranetworks.com> Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 20:43:27 +0100 From: Ian Dowse Message-ID: <200210182043.aa79221@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <31269226357BD211979E00A0C9866DAB02BB99F1@rios.sitaranetworks.com>, Chris Ptacek writes: >I had a process whose state under top was listed as devbuf. >This process seemed to be stuck and I was unable to kill it. >I ended up rebooting the box to reset it. > >None of the man pages (TOP, PS) list the devbuf state. >What is it and what was the process trying to do? >I am guessing it had something to do with memory allocation. It means that the kernel is trying to allocate memory with a type code of M_DEVBUF, but the kernel limit for that type has been reached. Hence the process is stuck waiting for something to free M_DEVBUF memory for it to use. `vmstat -m' shows the current amount of memory allocated by each malloc type. As the name suggests M_DEVBUF is normally used for buffers in kernel devices. Maybe you have created a very large number of devices or configured a device in a way that requires a lot of memory (e.g set a huge value for SC_HISTORY_SIZE), maybe there is a memory leak, or possibly you just need to increase the value of MAXUSERS in the kernel configuration file. Ian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message