Timeout table overflow in ISC 2.0.2

[mike.stefanik]

In an article, ohurley at cs.tcd.ie (Oisin Hurley) writes:
>This guy works on a 386 machine running ISC 2.0.2 . An interesting thing 
>occurred the other day when he manually killed a process - the message
>
>	WARNING: Timeout table overflow
>
>was sent to the console, continuously, resulting in the machine getting locked
>up. [...]

Generally speaking, this is a kernel configuration problem.  Your callout
table in the kernel isn't large enough (trying increasing the size of the NCALL
configuration parameter).

This may indicate a problem with a device driver on your system.  Typically,
the callout table is used by drivers to specify entry points in it's code to
execute by the kernel's clock handler at a specific time.  Drivers call the
function timeout() and provide a pointer to a function, an argument to that
function, and the number of clock ticks in the future that the kernel should
invoke it. The most common uses are for waiting on a busy device and sleeping
for n clock ticks, although delay() really should be used in the latter case.
Where you can get into trouble is when you use timeout() in the init portion
of the driver but the clock handler is disabled by a high priority device.

Hope this isn't *too* muddled. :-)

-- 
Michael Stefanik, MGI Inc, Los Angeles | Opinions stated are never realistic
Title of the week: Systems Engineer    | UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
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