Re: Getting big areas of memory, in 2.3.x?

Ingo Molnar
1999-12-10T13:42:28Z

On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, Rik van Riel wrote:

> It would assign certain types of use to certain
> zones of memory and do so dynamically.

(this is exactly what happens in the current page_alloc.c. Check out how
we handle GFP_DMA for example.)

> Ie. we'd have a 4MB zone allocated to kernel and pagetable stuff and
> other areas assigned to user pages. Now when we need to have another
> kernel data area we can move pages out of one of the user area's as
> needed. We can also move out arbitrarily large chunks of contiguous
> user pages if we need to allocate such an area.

this is possible (sans the relocation process which is a special thing
anyway), but why would we want to allocate large chunks of contiguous user
pages?

-- mingo