Re: [RFC] [PATCH] kmem_alloc (generic wrapper for kmalloc and vmalloc)

[Nick Piggin]

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> Robert Love schrieb:
>
> > On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 06:19 +0100, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
> >
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > it seems there is a bunch of drivers which want to allocate memory as
> > > efficiently as possible in a wide range of allocation sizes. XFS and
> > > NTFS seem to be examples. Implement a generic wrapper to reduce code
> > > duplication.
> > > Functions have the my_ prefixes to avoid name clash with XFS.
> >
> >
> > No, no, no.  A good patch would be fixing places where you see this.
> >
> > Code needs to conscientiously decide to use vmalloc over kmalloc.  The
> > behavior is different and the choice needs to be explicit.
>
>
> Yes, but what do you suggest for the following problem:
> alloc(max_loop*sizeof(struct loop_device))
>
> where sizeof(struct loop_device)==304 and 1<=max_loop<=16384
>
> For the smallest allocation (304 bytes) vmalloc is clearly wasteful
> and for the largest allocation (~ 5 MBytes) kmalloc doesn't work.

Can't you change it to use a hash or something?

Even a linked list if it is not performance critical.
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