From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: gmate.amit@gmail.com (Kumar amit mehta)
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2013 10:39:13 -0800
Subject: Query on skb buffer 
Message-ID: <20130306183913.GA3328@gmail.com>
To: kernelnewbies@lists.kernelnewbies.org
List-Id: kernelnewbies.lists.kernelnewbies.org

My current understanding is that the skb, while being passed along various
layers in linux network stack, will be manipulated majorly, using the
skb->{head|data|tail|end|len} fields. 

Suppose that my application (say 'ping') sends a ICMP echo request with a
large packet size of 4k, i.e. $ ping -s 4096 <dest addr>
Now, if alloc_skb(4096, GFP_KERNEL) is the routine that gets called to allocate
the kernel buffer then, how does the kernel manages such prospective memory 
allocation failures and how kernel manages large packet requests from the
application.

-Amit