Re: Bug: Discontigmem virt_to_page() [Alpha,ARM,Mips64?]

[Daniel Phillips]

On Friday 03 May 2002 07:15, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 09:08:18PM +0200, Daniel Phillips wrote:
> > On Thursday 02 May 2002 20:57, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > > 
> > > correct. The direct mapping is nothing magic, it's like a big static
> > > kmap area.  Everybody is required to use
> > > virt_to_page/page_address/pci_map_single/... to switch between virtual
> > > address and mem_map anyways (thanks to the discontigous mem_map), so you
> > > can use this property by making discontigous the virtual space as well,
> > > not only the mem_map.  discontigmem basically just allows that.
> > 
> > And what if you don't have enough virtual space to fit all the memory you
> 
> ZONE_NORMAL is by definition limited by the direct mapping size, so if
> you don't have enough virtual space you cannot enlarge the zone_normal
> anyways. If need more virtual space you can only do  things like
> CONFIG_2G.

I must be guilty of not explaining clearly.  Suppose you have the following
physical memory map:

	          0: 128 MB
	  8000,0000: 128 MB
	1,0000,0000: 128 MB
	1,8000,0000: 128 MB
	2,0000,0000: 128 MB
	2,8000,0000: 128 MB
	3,0000,0000: 128 MB
	3,8000,0000: 128 MB

The total is 1 GB of installed ram.  Yet the kernel's 1G virtual space,
can only handle 128 MB of it.  The rest falls out of the addressable range and
has to be handled as highmem, that is if you preserve the linear relationship
between kernel virtual memory and physical memory, as config_discontigmem does.
Even if you go to 2G of kernel memory (restricting user space to 2G of virtual)
you can only handle 256 MB.

By using config_nonlinear, the kernel can directly address all of that memory,
giving you the full 800MB or so to work with (leaving out the kmap regions etc)
as zone_normal.

-- 
Daniel