Re: [PATCH] ib_srpt: use kvmalloc to allocate ring pointers

[Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org>]

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On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 03:08:38PM +0000, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> On Tue, 2018-07-10 at 08:39 +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 04:51:08PM +0300, Jan Dakinevich wrote:
> > > An array of pointers to SRPT contexts in ib_device is over 30KiB even
> > > in default case, in which an amount of contexts is 4095. The patch
> > > is intended to weed out large contigous allocation for non-DMA memory.
> >
> > kvmalloc* doesn't "weed out" large contiguous allocations, but tries to
> > allocate them and gracefully fallback to vmalloc if kmalloc fails.
> >
> > More on that, for allocations less than page (64KB for PowerPC), it will
> > not call to vmalloc at all, which is fine too, because pages granularity.
> >
> > If you want to get rid of "contiguous allocations", use vmalloc instead.
>
> vmalloc() has a very significant disadvantage compared to kvmalloc(): with
> vmalloc() it is guaranteed that memory allocations will be slow. That's not
> the case for kvmalloc() if the number of bytes that is allocated is small
> enough.

Bart,

I'm not arguing, just pointing that the commit message doesn't reflect
actual change.

Thanks

>
> Bart.
>
>
>
>

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