[CentOS] Starting emacs gives "shmget failed: error 28" message

Thu Sep 3 21:35:27 UTC 2015
Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu>

On Thu, September 3, 2015 1:56 pm, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Robert Nichols wrote:
>> On 09/03/2015 04:00 AM, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
>>> On 09/03/2015 03:04 AM, Robert Nichols wrote:
>>>> In CentOS 6.7, if I start emacs from a terminal session, I always see
>>>> a message, "(emacs:{PID}): Gdk-WARNING **: shmget failed: error 28 (No
>>>> space left on device)"
>>>>
>>>> The message is also logged to .xsession-errors, and that occurs
>>>> regardless of how emacs is started. The same thing occurs with
>>>> SELinux in permissive mode.
>>>>
>>>> Emacs version is emacs-23.1-28.el6.x86_64 .
>>>>
>>>> Output from strace shows:
>>>>     shmget(IPC_PRIVATE, 393216, IPC_CREAT|0600) = -1 ENOSPC (No space
>>>> left on device)
>>>>
>>>> /proc/mounts contains:
>>>>     tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,seclabel,relatime 0 0
>>>>
>>>> and "df /dev/shm" shows:
>>>>     Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
>>>>     tmpfs            8194164   172   8193992   1% /dev/shm
>>>>
>>>> I can't identify any behavior problems that I can relate to this,
>>>> but it seems that something is wrong.  Any clues as to what?
>>>>
>>>
>>> just a shot in the dark, but what do you have in
>>> /proc/sys/kernel/shmmni ?
>>>
>>> According to man shmget:
>>> ENOSPC All possible shared memory IDs have been taken  (SHMMNI),  or
>>> allocating  a  segment  of  the requested  size  would  cause  the
>>> system  to  exceed  the system-wide limit on shared memory (SHMALL).
>>
>> "cat /proc/sys/kernel/shmmni" shows 4096.
>>
>> And, I find that "wc -l /proc/sysvipc/shm" shows that they are indeed
>> all in use. A badly coded java game appears to be the culprit. It's
>> grabbing SHM IDs by the thousands.
>>
>> Thanks for the pointer.  Your shot in the dark was right on target.
>>
>
> Simple solution: vi.
>

Also: ed. Just to mention one more, though I prefer vi ;-)

Valeri

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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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