[Lustre-discuss] mkfs.lustre (can't allocate memory)

[Andreas Dilger]

Josephine Palencia <josephin at psc.edu> wrote:
> /dev/cciss/c0d0p6            5780        8854    24699906   83  Linux
>
> mkfs.ext2 -j -b 4096 -L MGS  -J size=964 -q -O
> 		dir_index,uninit_groups -F /dev/cciss/c0d0p6
> mkfs.lustre: Unable to mount /dev/cciss/c0d0p6: Cannot allocate memory
> 
> mkfs.lustre FATAL: failed to write local files
> mkfs.lustre: exiting with 12 (Cannot allocate memory)

This is unusual, to run out of memory.  I would have said it relates
to having too-large a filesystem, but your filesystem is only 24GB.

Looking at the error messages printed, this ENOMEM (-12) error is coming
from the kernel.  Please check "dmesg" to see if the kernel is failing
some memory allocation.  You may also want to try this with full Lustre
debugging enabled (sysctl -w lnet.debug=-1) and then dump the debug log
(lctl dk /tmp/debug) and search for "-12" errors in the logs.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre Group
Sun Microsystems of Canada, Inc.