Gawen's blog

Enjoy life, one bit at a time.

ioctl mem-alloc FAILED

Posted on March 20, 2021 by gawen

If while trying to play a video on the RaspberryPi, in particular with Kodi, the video doesn’t play and you get this error on the terminal:

[CGPUMEM]: ioctl mem-alloc FAILED [-1]

Then hopefully this post will help you.

You may have read elsewhere that you should increase your GPU memory in /boot/config.txt, then add gpu_mem=256.

But that’s not enough. You also need to increase the limit of the contiguous memory allocator. In /boot/cmdline.txt add the option cma=256M. Then reboot and you should be fine.

App. freezing in i3

Posted on March 7, 2021 by gawen

If you encounter some applications freezing or taking a long time to start while using i3, I think in particular about Skype, Discord, CMST (Connman QT GUI), Hexchat, … then may be here is a solution for you. Those app do not appreciate when the desktop does not have any notification daemon running. So you might just install and start one when i3 starts.

So I’ve just installed lxqt-notificationd. Then you can start it from i3’s config file:

exec --no-startup-id lxqt-notificationd

Now all my applications work like a charm, and I’ve no reason whatsoever to temporarily switch to XFCE4.