Re: bigphysarea in 2.2

[David Mentre <David.Mentre@irisa.fr>]

Peter Monta <pmonta@halibut.imedia.com> writes:

> > Is it too late to ask that the bigphysarea patch be included in the
> > 2.1-and-soon-to-be-2.2 kernel?
> 
> Seconded.  Thanks for offering to maintain it.

 With the new kernel memory manager, and if the defragmenting code which
is under development works, wouldn't it be more useful to use standard
kernel memory allocation. Static allocation like in bigphysarea is more
a work-around that a real solution.

 Maybe we should ask the memory kernel hackers (Stephen, Ben, Rick,
Werner?) to support big allocations. I personally need 512 Kbytes
contiguous blocks for a direct-from/to-memory network card. A possible
problem is that those blocks should 512 Kbytes aligned (Argh!! !*%&@
hardware). 

 Is it doable with current code in 2.1 (due to feature freeze) ? On the
other side, I agree that at least a work-around like bigphysarea should
be included in 2.2. More and more PCI cards make direct access to memory
for big transfers.

Regards,
d.
-- 
 David.Mentre@irisa.fr -- http://www.irisa.fr/prive/dmentre/
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