This is a (small) part of larger work of replacing page allocator calls with kmalloc.
My initial intention a few month ago was to remove ugly casts [1], but then willy pointed out that Linus objected to something like this [2] and it looks like more than a decade old technical debt. Largely, anything that doesn't need struct page (or a memdesc in the future) should just use kmalloc() or kvmalloc() to allocate memory. kmalloc() guarantees alignment, physical contiguity and working virt_to_phys() and beside nicer API that returns void * on alloc and doesn't require to know the allocation size on free, kmalloc() provides better debugging capabilities than page allocator. Another thing is that touching these allocation sites gives the reviewers opportunity to see if a PAGE_SIZE buffer is actually needed or maybe another size is appropriate. For larger allocations that don't need physically contiguous memory kvmalloc() can be a better option that __get_free_pages() because under memory pressure it's is easier to allocate several order-0 pages than a physically contiguous chunk with the same number of pages. And last, but not least, removing needless calls to page allocator should help with memdesc (aka project folio) conversion. There will be way less places to audit to see if the user was actually using struct page. The patches are deliberately kept small: each one deals with a single driver or subsystem and with a single type of allocation, so that every conversion can be reviewed, and if needed reverted, on its own. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/[email protected]/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CA+55aFwp4iy4rtX2gE2WjBGFL=nxmvnofehqya2j1dyommg...@mail.gmail.com/ --- Mike Rapoport (Microsoft) (3): tty: port: replace get_zeroed_page() with kzalloc() serial: core: replace get_zeroed_page() with kzalloc() tty: hvcs: replace __get_free_page() with kmalloc() drivers/tty/hvc/hvcs.c | 6 +++--- drivers/tty/serial/serial_core.c | 16 ++++++++-------- drivers/tty/tty_port.c | 8 ++++---- 3 files changed, 15 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-) --- base-commit: 1b78070aaef63512688aebfbc82365ef9d6660f1 change-id: 20260829-tty-84f05b74862a -- Sincerely yours, Mike.
