As read from Linux Kernel Commentary, by the use of vmalloc : We can account for large virtual address space from possibly the end of physical memory - 8MB to the last addressable value of 32 bit. Use of vmalloc as such returns us a virtual address range that is futher mapped to the available physical memory in the kernel space or dynamicallly allocated memory by kernel in the user space, (though not contiguos) via kernel page tables. Now this kind of memory is not swappable since it is allocated for kernle use. The point here is now since this kind of memory is not swappable we cannot account for huge memory requirements which exceed the physical memory availabe both in kernel and user space. As such the concept of using vmalloc doesnot hold true for excessive memory requirements. Though it will give us a large virtual address space to work with, but the corresponding physical area could not be available and i think it is because of that when we go for mapping in the get_vma_mapping function, it returns an error if the space is not available. Please clarify the concept whether my understanding till date is right or wrong, and add any comments... Regards Jasmeet Singh ANAND _____________________________________________________________ SikhNet - http://www.SikhNet.com _____________________________________________________________ Get news on Sikhism and the Sikhnet web site Sign up at http://www.SikhNet.com/subscribe -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
