[ILUG] mm: critical shortage of bounce buffers

[John Allman]

Hi - I have a dual pentium III dell server, currently running redhat 7.1 
and kernel 2.4.3 and it has a tendency to crap out with "mm: critical 
shortage of bounce buffers". by crap out i mean hang.

A little reading has led me to believe this is due to the high memory 
mapping in early kernels:
http://lwn.net/2001/0531/kernel.php3
http://lwn.net/2001/0607/kernel.php3

Both of these articles mention 2.4.5 as being the latest. I was working 
on the assumption that this would be well patched by now and all i 
really needed to do was upgrade my kernel when i found this:

http://www.trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20020304/005486.html

which says:

"You can actually build yourself a custom none bounce
buffer 1.8GB kernel with about 2Gb of user virtual space per app." as 
his advice for fixing this problem.

Has anybody come accross this and am i right in thinking i can ignore 
the above and that a new kernel will fix my problem?

thanks

John