Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 14 Oct 1997 16:49:23 -0700
From:      Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>
To:        Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
Cc:        julian@whistle.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: LKM & Large contig malloc failure (Re: lkms versus hard linked drivers) 
Message-ID:  <199710142349.QAA01650@rah.star-gate.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 14 Oct 1997 16:51:43 EDT." <19971014165143.34402@ct.picker.com> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Your approach is probably the quickest way of solving the problem.

	Cheers,
	Amancio
>From The Desk Of Randall Hopper :
> Julian Elischer:
>  |mdean wrote:
>  |> My question is very simple: What can't be a lkm?
>  |
>  |the only function that MUST be done at bootup is allocation of LARGE
>  |physically contiguous buffers of ram.  because after running a few
>  |seconds ram get's fragmented..  large VIRTUALLY contiguous buffers are
>  |ok.
> 
> That explains it.  I just spent some time LKMizing the Brooktree (bktr) PCI
> capture driver to speed up development, only to find last night that
> vm_page_alloc_contig would just hang, whittling away swap and consuming 50%
> CPU with no end in sight.  
> 
> The driver is one of the few that does large contiguous mallocs (first a
> 32K bite; then a 3.5Meg gulp).
> 
> Searching the list archives for tips, I happened upon your post.
> 
> What's the best way around this?  Have a dummy "grab the memory" stub driver
> that runs on bootup, and then have the real driver in the LKM "borrow" this
> memory chunk away when it loads.  Not real clean, so this would of course
> just be a "for-development-only" hack.
> 
> Would sure be nice to make the driver generally available as an LKM though.
> Can anyone see a cleaner way around this problem?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Randall Hopper
> 



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199710142349.QAA01650>