Are there some potential problems that I should be aware of if I allocate the memory which doesn't have any relation to peripheral hardwares(i.e. DMA, PCI, serial port and etc) by vmalloc() instead of kmalloc()?

[孙世龙 sunshilong]

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

>Why are you having so many issues in allocating memory?
I often saw the page allocation failure recently. I must resolve this problem.
I have no choice other than disabling these options
(i.e. CONFIG-MIGRATION and CONFIG-COMPACTION)
since I am using a real-time OS.
It's easier to encounter such a problem since the said options are disabled.

>Does the kernel not provide enough different ways to do this for your
driver/device/use case?
The current code snippet is using kmalloc() and often encounter the
aforementioned problem.
So I want to use vmalloc() instead of kmalloc(). What do you think about it?
The memory to be allocated doesn't have any relation to any peripheral
hardware (i.e. DMA, PCI, serial port, etc) indeed. It's just used to
store a struct
array which indicates the usage of other resources.

Best regards.

Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> 于2020年6月26日周五 下午10:13写道：

>
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 04:30:48PM +0800, 孙世龙 sunshilong wrote:
> > Hi, list
> >
> > Besides kmalloc() is more efficient, are there some potential problems that
> > I should be aware of if I allocate the memory which doesn't have any
> > relation to peripheral hardwares(i.e. DMA,PCI,serial port and etc) by
> > vmalloc() instead of kmalloc() to avoid the page allocation failure(caused
> > by kmalloc() while there are too much memory fragment)?
>
> It all depends on what you want to do with that memory.
>
> Why are you having so many issues in allocating memory?  Does the kernel
> not provide enough different ways to do this for your driver/device/use
> case?
>
> If not, what are you trying to do that is not fitting with the existing
> interfaces?
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h