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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH][2/17] USB virt 2.6 split driver---xenidc buffer


On 22 Nov 2005, at 10:55, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote:

I don't understand this.  I thought vmalloc was more likely to be
successful than kmalloc because the memory doesn't need to be contiguous
so I thought it was preferable to use vmalloc when possible.

Nope, vmalloc has both a resource usage issue (we only have a limited
vmalloc space) and some small overhead that kmalloc doesn't. The only
time you should use vmalloc is if you know that kmalloc can't give you
a large enough buffer.

If the buffer is > PAGE_SIZE, you should use vmalloc if at all possible. Order != 0 allocations can easily fail on a churned box with lots of memory fragmentation.

 -- Keir


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