Re: difference bigphysarea patch and kmalloc

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Hi Mosta...

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 10:51 PM, mosta<mosta.me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> hey everyone,
>
> is there a difference between kmalloc(size, GFP_KERNEL | GFP_DMA) and
> bigphysarea_alloc (size). I god a driver that use the bigphysarea patch and I
> changed it to use kmalloc (because for my kernel version there is no patch)
> and it worked. So my question is, is the bigphysarea patch arcade and kmalloc
> can allocate enough continuous memory or did I just added on error to the
> driver ;-).
>
> Oh I use the 3.6.24.3 Kernel
>
> greetings mosta

Once I read this bigphysarea patch a bit ( not sure, probably when
answering related question from you days weeks ago) and I came to the
conclusion that essentially it's the same like doing kmalloc with DMA.

I guess the reason why bigphysarea patch created was likely at old
version of Linux kernels, there was no option to reserve such memory
area like we have now with bootmemalloc IIRC.

Also, kmalloc might fail to allocate the amout of memory (especially
if it is big enough) you need due to fragmentation, something that
unlikely happen during boot stage because RAM is still in "fresh"
condition.

-- 
regards,

Mulyadi Santosa
Freelance Linux trainer
blog: the-hydra.blogspot.com

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