Re: Ideas for memory management hackers.

Henrik Storner (storner@image.dk)
Fri, 14 Nov 1997 23:13:12 +0100


Rik van Riel <H.H.vanRiel@fys.ruu.nl> writes:

>Send Linux memory-management wishes to me: I'm currently looking
>for something to hack...

Getting DMA-able memory with kmalloc can be a problem. AFAIK, Linux
memory management is not geared toward keeping some memory free below
the 16 MB limit where ISA cards can do DMA - all memory is treated
equal. This poses some problems when e.g. a network driver needs to
get a DMA-able buffer *now* - sometimes it just fails to provide
one, and the driver usually has little choice but to drop the data into
the bit-bucket.

I would like to see some improvement in this area - perhaps through
a sysctrl-parameter that tells the kernel to maintain a pool of X Kb
DMA-capable memory.

-- 
Henrik Storner                               http://www.image.dk/~storner/ 
"The POP3 server service depends on the SMTP server service, which
 failed to start because of the following error:
 The operation completed successfully." -Windows NT Server v3.51