Kay, If the system is using 480MB out of 512MB for buffers, that's not what is "crippling" your system. Linux won't use that much for buffers if it is experiencing storage shortages in other areas.
I've gotten communication drivers failing at system startup with alleged "no storage available" messages, but re-starting the system immediately got a good result. (Rather annoying and worrisome at the same time.) What was the exact message from the network driver when it failed to start? Have you tried re-IPLing since then, to see if the problem is repeatable? fsck doesn't allocate buffer storage. It checks integrity/consistency of the file system, and that's all. If you want less storage allocated to buffers, you need to give Linux less storage to start with. In an LPAR, this should _not_ be a problem, since it truly does have all that storage all to itself. I really think you're looking at this problem backwards. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Kay Elcombe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 1:02 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: LVM and buffer requirement We haven't installed VM yet. The Linux test LPAR has 512MB of memory, of which over 480MB is shown as the buffer, crippling the system. Would you know how FSCK works ? Is it supposed to allocate and free the buffer space for the file system ? Would you recommend that we run FSCK regularly ? Is there a way to force the system to free the buffer ? Thank you very much Kay -----Original Message----- From: Post, Mark K [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, 22 November, 2002 15:53 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: LVM and buffer requirement Not exactly, but unless you really _need_ 512MB for your instance (and not many things do) you would be better off cutting your VM size down to something like 128MB (or even 64MB), and using V-disk for swap. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Kay Elcombe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 1:31 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: LVM and buffer requirement We had set up a 60GB logical volume group and it nearly killed the system (SUSE Linux 7.0 on S/390 LPAR without VM). Almost all available memory had been taken up for the buffer (480 MB of 512MB), and the OSA failed on IPL due to a memory shortage. Would someone know how the buffers are allocated and freed ? Thanks Kay
