From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Fri, 8 Feb 2002 02:31:29 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Fri, 8 Feb 2002 02:31:19 -0500 Received: from [217.7.28.131] ([217.7.28.131]:1297 "EHLO inetgate.hob.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Fri, 8 Feb 2002 02:31:05 -0500 Message-ID: <3C637CDD.E0EEBF96@hob.de> Date: Fri, 08 Feb 2002 08:23:09 +0100 From: Christian Hildner Organization: hob electronic X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.78 [de]C-CCK-MCD DT (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: de MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jes Sorensen Cc: LKML Subject: Re: [Linux-ia64] kmalloc() size-limitation In-Reply-To: <3C3D6A89.27EAA4C7@hob.de> <15421.61910.163437.45726@napali.hpl.hp.com> <3C3ED5E7.8BA479B7@hob.de> <15423.5404.65155.924018@napali.hpl.hp.com> <3C43D6EC.74B4EC85@hob.de> <3C5F80F2.54AF98E3@hob.de> <15458.41366.1639.628598@trained-monkey.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Jes Sorensen schrieb: > >>>>> "Christian" == Christian Hildner writes: > > Christian> Jes Sorensen schrieb: > >> Because drivers needs to work on all architectures and relying on > >> different hahavior from kmalloc() is bad. > > Christian> sorry for being unclear. I mean from increasing the kmalloc() > Christian> size-limit all platforms would benefit. > > Thats not really a good idea, and definately not something you want to > rely on. A lot of architectures are still stuck with 4KB pages and > trying to allocate 128KB on larger in one chunk is likely to fail after > the system has been running for a while. On an ia64 with 16KB or 64KB > pages it's fairly likely it will work, but this is not necessarily a > good idea to do for other archs. If you need such a large block of > memory, vmalloc() is the real way to go. > > Jes I think you are right. Memory fragmentation will become a real problem on small machines. Christian