Re: bigphysarea support in 2.2.19 and 2.4.0 kernels

Jeff V. Merkey
2000-12-21T22:20:11Z

On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 09:32:46PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > A question related to bigphysarea support in the native Linux
> > 2.2.19 and 2.4.0 kernels.
> >
> > I know there are patches for this support, but is it planned for
> > rolling into the kernel by default to support Dolphin SCI and
> > some of the NUMA Clustering adapters. I see it there for some
> > of the video adapters.
>
> bigphysarea is the wrong model for 2.4. The bootmem allocator means that
> drivers could do early claims via the bootmem interface during boot up. That
> would avoid all the cruft.
>
> For 2.2 bigphysarea is a hack, but a neccessary add on patch and not one you
> can redo cleanly as we don't have bootmem
>
> I belive Pauline Middelink had a patch implementing bigphysarea in terms of
> bootmem
>
> Alan

Alan,

Thanks for the prompt response. I am merging the Dolphin SCI High Speed
interconnect drivers into 2.2.18 and 2.4.0 for our M2FS project, and I
am reviewing the big ugly nasty patch they have current as of 2.2.13
(really old). I will be looking over the 2.4 tree for a more clean
manner to do what they want.

What's in the patch alters the /proc filesystem, and the VM code. I will
submit a patch against 2.2.19 and 2.4.0 for this support for their SCI
adapters after I get a handle on it.

:-)

Jeff