Re: Allocating uge chunks of kernel memory

Stephen Williams (steve@icarus.icarus.com)
Sat, 07 Feb 1998 15:37:53 -0800


alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk said:
> There is an optional "bigphysarea" patch that one of the other capture
> drivers with similar hardware weaknesses uses. It commits the memory
> at boot time.

Where might I find the "biphysarea" patch? (I'm using 2.0.32.)

That will probably do nicely. I understand that fragmentation would diminish
my odds of getting a dynamically allocated large buffer. My application is
somewhat specialized and I'm willing to hack the kernel to get what I want.

Incidentally, Windows NT allows me to allocate these huge buffers. I notice
that when I do so, it takes a long time and I hear the disk going for a
while. I suspect it is dropping buffers, and possibly paging out process
memory to get that stretch I need. It seems that page_alloc.c has the
beginnings of this, but only works for single-page allocations.

-- 
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve@icarus.com              But I have promises to keep,
steve@picturel.com            and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu