kern.maxpipekva exceeded, please see tuning(7)

[John DeStefano]

> From: Jason Henson <jason at ec.rr.com>
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 02:00:48 +0000
> Subject: Re: kern.maxpipekva exceeded, please see tuning(7)
> On 03/13/05 15:44:32, John DeStefano wrote:
> > I have seen a mention or two of this error on the lists before,
> > including this link to the "current" list I pulled up from Google:
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-January/019150.html
> >
> > In my case, the errors began after my exploratory two-year-old found
> > the shiny 'reset' button and could not resist its powers.  I'm also
> > getting HDD error messages on boot, 'fsck -y' shows all the file
> > systems as read-only and returns errors on one of them, and I can no
> > longer SSH into my system (due to, I assume, too many open file
> > handles), or even get a command in on my console without an error
> > popping in..
> >
> > The solution does not seem clear cut to me, and it seems the error
> > message itself does not provide valid (or, at least, sufficient)
> > information.
> >
> > Could someone please help, or point me in the right direction?
> >
> > Thanks, as always,
> > John
> > _______________________________________________
>
> FreeBSD is very robust with power failures, but that was a reset
> button.  Do you have acpi on?  When I hit my power button every once in
> a while my system shuts down properly.  Try booting into single user
> mode and do a manual mount and fsck.
>
> And just to help you out:
>
> $ sysctl -ad | grep pipekva
> kern.ipc.maxpipekva: Pipe KVA limit
> kern.ipc.pipekva: Pipe KVA usage
> $ sysctl -a | grep pipekva
> kern.ipc.maxpipekva: 8634368
> kern.ipc.pipekva: 344064
>
Thanks to Jason's instructions, I was able to boot into -s mode,
manually mount and fsck the slices, and add the two kernel
paramenters to /boot/loader.conf, using his maxpipekva and pipekva
parameters and values
ver batim; and this seemed to get me back up and running.

Howver, whenever I now try to perform any intensive operations, such
as cvsup or makeworld, the errors come right back and do not desist
unless I reboot the machine.

Is there a recommended value for these parameters if I've got a total
of 340MB RAM, or another way of solving this problem?

Thank you,
~John