From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from parasite.irisa.fr (parasite.irisa.fr [131.254.12.47]) by kvack.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id HAA24836 for ; Sat, 11 Apr 1998 07:00:56 -0400 Subject: Re: bigphysarea in 2.2 References: <199804101746.KAA15720@halibut.imedia.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.95) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII From: David Mentre Date: 11 Apr 1998 12:56:10 +0200 In-Reply-To: Peter Monta's message of "Fri, 10 Apr 1998 10:46:54 -0700" Message-ID: Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: pmonta@imedia.com Cc: steve@icarus.icarus.com, linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu, torvalds@transmeta.com, linux-mm@, @kvack.org List-ID: Peter Monta 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/ == GNU & Linux: Change _our_ world ==