On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 2:50 AM, David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The idea is that you call prom_retain() before you take a look at what > physical memory is available in the kernel, and the firmware takes > this physical chunk out of those available memory lists upon > prom_retain() success. This sounds like exactly the API I would have wanted, however: 1) It's only available in arch/sparc so I can't test my patch if I try to use it; 2) There's nobody that calls it so it might not work; 3) I don't understand the API so I'm not really confident that reserving memory this way will actually prevent it from being seen by the kernel. In short, I think I would screw it up. On the other hand, as written it seems like my code would also work on sparc, and would work with more than one kind of memory area if more than one module chose to use this technique. (ie. Since the prober actually reserves memory, the next prober would necessarily reserve a different bit of memory, and as long as you're using the same kernel as before and you do all reservations before enabling interrupts, you should get consistent results.) I suppose I could move the actual probe-and-allocate code somewhere (bootmem.c? memblock.c?) and add a 'name' parameter to it which is ignored in the generic implementation. Then someone could write an arch-specific implementation. Would that work? If so, please recommend which file to put the generic implementation in :) Thanks, Avery -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>