From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Keith Owens Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 22:48:40 +0000 Subject: Re: SAL functions related questions... Message-Id: <19883.1080859720@ocs3.ocs.com.au> List-Id: References: <406C22FC.6090907@Ext.Bull.Net> In-Reply-To: <406C22FC.6090907@Ext.Bull.Net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 01 Apr 2004 16:11:08 +0200, Francois Wellenreiter wrote: >And which size does exactly SAL_GET_STATE_INFO_SIZE return ? It returns the maximum size of the specified record type. >When should >this function be called to allocate large enough buffers (after >receiving INIT interrupt or at kernel startup) ? In theory you could use SAL_GET_STATE_INFO_SIZE just before reading the record. However MCA and INIT events are not irq safe, you must _NOT_ call any kernel routines that depend on disabled locks during an MCA or INIT event. All kernel memory allocation routines depend on disabled locks so it is not safe to use those routines during an MCA or INIT event, which means that you must preallocate memory for these record types. Therefore Linux preallocates storage for each record type during boot.