2002-02-08 07:31:29

by Christian Hildner

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: [Linux-ia64] kmalloc() size-limitation

Jes Sorensen schrieb:

> >>>>> "Christian" == Christian Hildner <[email protected]> writes:
>
> Christian> Jes Sorensen schrieb:
> >> Because drivers needs to work on all architectures and relying on
> >> different hahavior from kmalloc() is bad.
>
> Christian> sorry for being unclear. I mean from increasing the kmalloc()
> Christian> size-limit all platforms would benefit.
>
> Thats not really a good idea, and definately not something you want to
> rely on. A lot of architectures are still stuck with 4KB pages and
> trying to allocate 128KB on larger in one chunk is likely to fail after
> the system has been running for a while. On an ia64 with 16KB or 64KB
> pages it's fairly likely it will work, but this is not necessarily a
> good idea to do for other archs. If you need such a large block of
> memory, vmalloc() is the real way to go.
>
> Jes

I think you are right. Memory fragmentation will become a real problem on
small machines.

Christian