On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> > On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > > On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> > >
> > > > Buddy allocator is broken - kill it. Or at least do not misuse it for
> > > > anything except kernel or driver initialization.
> > >
> > > Please send patches to get rid of the buddy allocator while
> > > still making it possible to allocate contiguous chunks of
> > > memory.
> > >
> > > If you have any idea on how to fix things, this would be a
> > > good time to let us know.
> >
> > Here goes the fix. (note that I didn't try to compile it so there may be
> > bugs, but you see the point).
>
> So what are you going to do when your 64MB of vmalloc space
> runs out ?
Make larger vmalloc space :-) Virtual memory costs very little.
Besides 64M / 8k = 8192 - so it runs out at 8192 processes.
Of course vmalloc space can overflow - but it overflows only when the
machine is overloaded with too many processes, too many processes with
many filedescriptors etc. On the other hand, the buddy allocator fails
*RANDOMLY*. Totally randomly, depending on cache access patterns and
page allocation times.
Mikulas
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