On Wed, Sep 02, 2026 at 01:41:54PM +0200, Eli Billauer wrote: > On 01/09/2026 19:46, Mike Rapoport wrote: > > > * Does vmalloc() guarantee that non-pageable physical RAM is allocated > > > when > > > it returns? > > It's not pageable in the sense of demand paging. Some architectures lazily > > synchronize vmalloc page tables and this can cause page faults that will > > take care of the page table synchronization. > > > > Thanks for this clarification. > > This sounds like a showstopper to me. Immediately after the allocation of > these buffers, data from the USB device can arrive at 400 MB/s. If the data > flow is throttled as a result of handling page faults while trying to write
Note that these page faults are supposed to be uncommon in nature. They will only happen in architectures where the top-level page tables are not pre-populated, and when they weren't populated before. On a 64-bit architecture that would be something like every 512 GiB of address space :) > the data to these buffers, this could lead to an overflow in the USB > device's own RAM buffers. This is because the USB device is an FPGA, where > RAM is an expensive resource. > > So using vmalloc() may result in a malfunction in the data transport where > the __get_free_pages() would have been successful. This outweighs the > benefit of a somewhat higher probability of success in allocating very large > buffers, and surely the improved aesthetics of the kernel code. > > Regards, > Eli > -- Pedro
