Re: using kmalloc

[Jan Hudec]

> kmalloc() allocates physically-contiguous pages of memory. Due to
> fragmentation, more than 64KB-128KB of contiguous pages might not be
> available, and hence kmalloc() will fail.

kmalloc allocates from generic slab caches. They come in sizes of powers
of 2 from 32B to 128KiB. The largest has slabs 128KiB large (on i386 at least).
Pages are allocated via __get_free_pages, so they have to be continuous.

However if you allocate namy instances of some structure, it's best to create
a kmem cache and allocate via kmem_cache_alloc (since it does not round the
requested size up to a power of two).

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                  				- Jan Hudec `Bulb' <[e-mail]>