[TuxOnIce-users] Help with "Not enough free memory" error

[Nigel Cunningham]

Hi Ben.

On 30/04/10 04:16, Ben Rich wrote:
> Can't anyone help me with this problem?  I know I have enough memory,
> so what could be the problem?  I think it is something to do with my
> kernel configuration, although I have been over it many times.  Please
> help!

Sorry for the delay in replying.

> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 3:11 PM, Ben Rich<mrbrich at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've used TuxOnIce before, and I has always worked well for me.  Now,
>> I have a problem with it, and I'm hoping that someone will be able to
>> help me out because I think it must be a simple problem.  When I
>> initiate hibernation (sudo hibernate -F /etc/hibernate/tuxonice.conf),
>> the system begins to hibernate but then wakes up again right away.  In
>> dmesg output, I see the following:
>>
>> PM: Creating hibernation image:
>> PM: Need to copy 1032191 pages
>> PM: Normal pages needed: 1032191 + 1024, available pages: 931534
>> PM: Not enough free memory
>> Error -12 hibernating

This isn't output from TuxOnIce. Whether you intend to or not, you're 
using swsusp.

>> I'm trying to save the image to my swap partition /dev/sda2 which is
>> 4GB (same as RAM).  Here is the output of the free command, which
>> shows that very little memory is actually being used, and that the
>> swap partition should be big enough to hold the image:
>>
>> [ben at t400s ~]$ free -m
>>             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>> Mem:          3858        645       3213          0         17        297
>> -/+ buffers/cache:        329       3528
>> Swap:         4096          1       4095
>>
>>
>> Please ask if there is any more information that I can provide that
>> will be useful for debugging this problem.  Thank you in advance.

How is the machine configured? (32 bit or 64 bit distro?) I could see 
this happening with a 32 bit kernel where for whatever reason too much 
low memory was mlocked and the computer was unable to get enough for the 
atomic copy. With 64 bits, I'd struggle to think of a way you could get 
this happening.

Regards,

Nigel