Re: Running out of vmalloc space

Andi Kleen
2001-05-17T20:17:02Z

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 08:51:49PM +0200, Hua Ji wrote:
> For example, if your machine has a physical memory of 256M. And then your
> vmalloc can only manage
> (1G-256M-8M) space.

Not quite true with 2.4 anymore: Linux can put physical memory that doesn't
fit between PAGE_OFFSET and the beginning of special mappings into highmem,
where it is only mapped from on demand.
Highmem has some penalties (double buffering on IO, cannot be used directly
by many kernel subsystems), but is still usable.

So moderately increasing the vmalloc area should not be a big problem. Of
course it should still leave some directly mapped space for the kernel.

-Andi