vmalloc size

[Dave Hylands]

Hi Subbu,

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 7:45 PM, Subramaniam Appadodharana
<c.a.subramaniam at gmail.com> wrote:
...snip...
>> However, if you call vmalloc and lets suppose that vmalloc just
>> happens to return 0xE0000000. The physical address of the first page
>> might be 0xD2345000.
>>
>> What's important is that the physical pages which back up the vmalloc
>> area all come from the kernel direct mapped area. They won't ever be
>> backed by pages from high-memory. So the physical addresses will all
>> be in the range 0x40000000 thru 0x5FFFFFFF.
>>
> This is the one that I had a completely wrong understanding of!!!!!!!
> I understand from the above statement that  the vmalloc'ed virtual address
> will _ALWAYS_  correspond to a  physical address from the lowmem region! I
> was under the impression that the carved out region for the vmalloc,
> is the one that would back any vmalloc'ed virtual address, which is
> absolutely wrong by what you are saying.

Actually, I was the one that was wrong. vmalloc pages can come from
low or highmem.

> Now this also means that increasing vmalloc inadvertently reduces lowmem.
> Why is this designed such a way?

It may or may not depending on the amount of physical memory and the
size of the vmalloc space.

vmalloc space will normally increase vmalloc_end, which won't reduce lowmem.
If the end can't advance any further, then I believe that the start
can be reduced. This will reduce lowmem, if the lowmem overlaps with
vmalloc memory.

> Essentially, the idea that we increase vmalloc is because we expect more
> memory to be consumed via vmalloc
> calls, and hence we might need more physical address backing. But increasing
> vmalloc decreases low mem, which would also mean that we have less backing.
> Am I missing something here too :)?

No - that was my mistake.

-- 
Dave Hylands
Shuswap, BC, Canada
http://www.davehylands.com