Re: 2.2.0 wishlist

Bryn Paul Arnold Jones (bpaj@gytha.demon.co.uk)
Sun, 16 Jun 1996 00:57:46 +0100 (BST)

On Fri, 14 Jun 1996, Marek Michalkiewicz wrote:
[...]
> > Impossible. DMA *needs* contiguous memory, and how you allocate
>
> I know. But perhaps it would be possible to change the way memory
> is allocated so that it tries to minimize fragmentation. I am not
> an expert here, so please tell me if it totally doesn't make sense,
> but here are a few ideas (unless it is already done this way):
>

Perhaps we need a defrag memory function for use with GPF_DMA, that
pages out adjacent pages, and then allocates them, glueing them together
to produce a bigger area. Perhaps this should be done over time (at a
low priority) so that bigger pages are continually produced. I suspect
that getting a large (96k) DMAable piece of memory on a moderately loaded
box after a few weeks would be next to nil, that's a bad thing IMHO.

> Marek
>
Bryn

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