Query on skb buffer

Kumar amit mehta gmate.amit at gmail.com
Wed Mar 6 13:39:13 EST 2013


My current understanding is that the skb, while being passed along various
layers in linux network stack, will be manipulated majorly, using the
skb->{head|data|tail|end|len} fields. 

Suppose that my application (say 'ping') sends a ICMP echo request with a
large packet size of 4k, i.e. $ ping -s 4096 <dest addr>
Now, if alloc_skb(4096, GFP_KERNEL) is the routine that gets called to allocate
the kernel buffer then, how does the kernel manages such prospective memory 
allocation failures and how kernel manages large packet requests from the
application.

-Amit



More information about the Kernelnewbies mailing list