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.