Hi Mosta... On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 10:51 PM, mosta<[email protected]> 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 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send an email with "unsubscribe kernelnewbies" to [email protected] Please read the FAQ at http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ
