Re: Alloc and lock down large amounts of memory

Mike Galbraith
2002-08-21T14:35:53Z

Roland Kuhn wrote:

>On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Mike Galbraith wrote:
>
>>At 03:08 PM 8/20/2002 -0500, Bhavana Nagendra wrote:
>>
>>>>Curiosity: why do you want to do device DMA buffer
>>>>allocation from userland?
>>>>
>>>I need 256M memory for a graphics operation. It's a requiremment,
>>>can't change it. There will be other reasonably sized allocs in kernel
>>>space, this is a special case that will be done from userland. As
>>>discussed earlier in this thread, there's no good way of alloc()ing
>>>and pinning that much in DMA memory space, is there?
>>>
>>Not that I know of. It seems to me that any interface that tried
>>to provide this would have to know what kind of device is going
>>to DMA from/to that ram.
>>
>>Usually, when someone needs a large gob of contiguous ram,
>>folks suggest doing the allocation in kernel, and early.
>>
>BTW: What is the limit for pci_alloc_consistent and friends? Can it really
>provide 256MB?
>

Dunno. The page allocator however (lowest) can deliver 1 << MAX_ORDER
contiguous
pages per request.. unless fragmentation gets you that is, so I doubt
it's remotely possible
to get 256MB of _physically_ contiguous ram without doing early
allocation of some sort.
(bootmem, bigphysarea patches or whatnot)

-Mike