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How to free Vmalloc memory on the fly

I'm using linux to record DVB directly to disk. My problem is that when Vmalloc fills up it freeze DVB driver. I need to find a way to empty that Vmalloc the fly. So far only solution is to reboot the server and it's not a good solution.

[root@refrecord ~]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 2076108 kB
MemFree: 1965880 kB
Buffers: 8328 kB
Cached: 63164 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 41336 kB
Inactive: 46100 kB
HighTotal: 1179596 kB
HighFree: 1094488 kB
LowTotal: 896512 kB
LowFree: 871392 kB
SwapTotal: 3068404 kB
SwapFree: 3068404 kB
Dirty: 28 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 28632 kB
Slab: 8788 kB
CommitLimit: 4106456 kB
Committed_AS: 88064 kB
PageTables: 1432 kB
VmallocTotal: 114680 kB
VmallocUsed: 21168 kB <-- when this fills up, it server will crash
VmallocChunk: 93008 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
Hugepagesize: 4096 kB
[root@refrecord ~]#
[root@refrecord ~]# uname -a
Linux refrecord 2.6.16-1.2108_FC4 #1 Thu May 4 23:52:01 EDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Please, any suggestion

-Jussi

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ravenpl

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SOLUTION

pjedmond

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ravenpl

> Their kernels only include the 'well tried and tested' elements in kernel, and shouldn't 'leak' as you seem to be experiencing.
Started using RHEL43 - not really true. Many bugs that are already patched in vanilla(including some security flaws)

pjedmond

I'd also like to retract that statement as I'm now a little embarrassed by it. - Discovered that Xen is in there as well! - Hardly tried and tested. You have to ask yourself whether Redhat is now involved in 'feature' races with other distros! I think that a different ideology is now being used to develop the Redhat product.

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