Re: [TCLUG:6710] log message "kernel: Sound error: Couldn't allocate DMA buffer"

[Sandipan Panigrahi <pani@frontiernet.net>]

You can get a work around for that at:
 http://www.alsa-project.org/~perex/page_alloc.html
But you will have to rebuild your kernel.

I remember reading some where a long time ago that the 2.2 development 
kernel had an option to reserve memory below the 16M limit. 

You could also try loading a large program into memory, like netscape
and then exiting from it. This might swap out some things to the disk
that are below 16M and then when netscape exits there could be some
memory below the 16M limit freed up.

The problem is that ISA DMA pages have to be in the lower 16M of your
memory. Something to do with the PC architecture, I do not know what
:-).

Hope this helps,,
sandipan




Steve Siegfried wrote:
> 
> Folks,
> 
> I use a number of audio cues on my PC running Linux (AOL's "You've got mail"
> audio-snippet hooked up to coolmail, a Westminister clock that chimes on the
> quarter hour, etc).  Starting somwhere back about RH5.2 and continuing with
> RH6.0, I've seen a number of sound failures with log messages like:
> 
>    > Jun 24 11:15:00 <nodename> kernel: Sound error: Couldn't allocate DMA buffer
> 
> Often while this is happening, invoking sox gives:
>    > sox: Can't open output file '/dev/dsp': Cannot allocate memory
> 
> The funny thing about this is that after I boot, sound works just fine.
> But once that log message shows up, my PC remains mute until I reboot.
> 
> Anybody else seen something like this and possibly know the cure?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> -Steve Siegfried
>  sos@skypoint.com
> 
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