Re: [PATCH] NUMA aware allocation of transmit and receive buffers for e1000

[Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx>]

Ganesh Venkatesan <ganesh.venkatesan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 5/17/05, Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I think the e1000 driver is being a bit insane there.  I figure that
> Do you mean insane to use vmalloc?
> 
> > sizeof(struct e1000_buffer) is 28 on 64-bit, so even with 4k pagesize we'll
> > always succeed in being able to support a 32k/32 = 1024-entry Tx ring.
> > 
> > Is there any real-world reason for wanting larger ring sizes than that?
> > 
> > 
> We have had cases where allocation of 32K of memory (via kmalloc) fails. 
> 

Are you sure?  The current page allocator will infinitely loop until
success for <=32k GFP_KERNEL allocations - the only way it can fail is if
the calling process gets oom-killed.