Openshift Event Code: 1038NODE0008

Summary: System Memory Exceeds Reservation

This article applies to This article does not apply to This article is not tied to any specific product. Not all product versions are identified in this article.

Symptoms

System memory usage on certain node exceeds 95% of the reservation.

Cause

Reserved memory ensures system processes can function even when the node is fully allocated and protects against workload out of memory events impacting the proper functioning of the node.

The default reservation is expected to be sufficient for most configurations and should be increased (https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/latest/nodes/nodes/nodes-nodes-managing.html) when running nodes with high numbers of pods (either due to rate of change or at steady state).

Resolution

Diagnostic

Check the systemReserved configuration applied to the nodes: 

$ oc get nodes
[...]
$ oc debug node/[node_name] -- cat /host/etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf
[...]
systemReserved:
 cpu: 500m
 memory: 1Gi
 ephemeral-storage: 1Gi
[...]

Check the resources used in the nodes (check the values used by kubelet and runtime if you
want to compare with the configured systemReserved values):

$ oc get --raw /api/v1/nodes/<node>/proxy/stats/summary
[...]
 {
    "node": {
        "nodeName": "cluster.node22",
        "systemContainers": [
            {
                "cpu": {
                    "usageCoreNanoSeconds": 929684480915,
                    "usageNanoCores": 190998084
                },
                "memory": {
                    "rssBytes": 176726016,
                    "usageBytes": 1397895168,
                    "workingSetBytes": 1050509312
                },
                "name": "kubelet"
            },
            {
                "cpu": {
                    "usageCoreNanoSeconds": 128521955903,
                    "usageNanoCores": 5928600
                },
                "memory": {
                    "rssBytes": 35958784,
                    "usageBytes": 129671168,
                    "workingSetBytes": 102416384
                },
                "name": "runtime"
            }
    [...
            ]
        ]
    }
} 
[...]

Mitigation

Increasing the memory reservations to resolve the issue. 

For example, to set resource allocation for the default worker MachineConfigPool , create the following CR inside project openshift-config-operator:

WARNING: This will trigger a serial restart of nodes using this MachineConfigPool

apiVersion: machineconfiguration.openshift.io/v1
kind: KubeletConfig
metadata:
 name: set-allocatable 
spec:
 machineConfigPoolSelector:
  matchLabels:
    pools.operator.machineconfiguration.openshift.io/worker: "" 
 kubeletConfig:
  systemReserved:
    cpu: 500m  	                 # change the CPU if needed
    memory: 1512Mi               # change the memory if needed

Support

If all the above steps cannot resolve the issue, contact the Dell EMC technical support for further investigation.

Affected Products

APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift
Article Properties
Article Number: 000217423
Article Type: Solution
Last Modified: 20 فبراير 2026
Version:  3
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