Andrew, There is a limit to how much memory you can allocate in the kernel space, if I remember correctly. On top of this, kernel memory is wired, so allocating large chunks has a very negative affect on system performance. I forget specifcally how to set the limit for kernel allocations unfortunately. -Brian On Wednesday, August 13, 2003, at 11:36 AM, Andrew Gallatin wrote: I've got a kext which does some BSD things already, so I'm using the BSD MALLOC(). I've found that MALLOC (ret, void *, len, M_DEVBUF, M_WAITOK); will fail when I attempt to allocate 135167 bytes, and there are ~700MB free (according to top). Is there anything I can do to determine why this allocation is failing? Or, better, to make it succeed? Since there seems to be plenty of ram, I'm guessing that the problem must be a lack of space in the kernel map, or a limit on the number of allocations allowed in some zone. This is Darwin Kernel Version 6.6: Thu May 1 21:48:54 PDT 2003 on a dual g4 with 1280MB of ram. FWIW, it also fails on 6.3. Thanks, Drew _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.