2002-02-04 21:18:10

by Jes Sorensen

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

Christian Hildner <[email protected]> writes:

> David,
>
> you proposed me to use alloc_pages() instead of kmalloc() in order
> to get memory bigger than the 128K limit of the kmalloc() call. But
> even driver-developers don't want to handle with the page struct
> unless this is unavoidable. Which are the disadvantages of
> increasing the size limit of kmalloc() to 256K, 512K or 1M since
> machines are getting bigger and 64Bit machines break with current
> memory limitations?

Because drivers needs to work on all architectures and relying on
different hahavior from kmalloc() is bad.

Jes