These patches came out of the "[RFC] mmap(MAP_CONTIG)" discussions at:
http://lkml.kernel.org/r/21f1ec96-2822-1189-1c95-79a2bb491571@oracle.com

One suggestion in that thread was to create a friendlier interface that
could be used by drivers and others outside core mm code to allocate a
contiguous set of pages.  The alloc_contig_range() interface is used for
this purpose today by CMA and gigantic page allocation.  However, this is
not a general purpose interface.  So, wrap alloc_contig_range() in the
more general interface:

struct page *find_alloc_contig_pages(unsigned int order, gfp_t gfp, int nid,
                                        nodemask_t *nodemask)

This interface is essentially the same functionality provided by the
hugetlb specific routine alloc_gigantic_page().  After creating the
interface, change alloc_gigantic_page() to call find_alloc_contig_pages()
and delete all the supporting code in hugetlb.c.

A new use case for allocating contiguous memory has been identified in
Intel(R) Resource Director Technology Cache Pseudo-Locking.

Mike Kravetz (3):
  mm: change type of free_contig_range(nr_pages) to unsigned long
  mm: add find_alloc_contig_pages() interface
  mm/hugetlb: use find_alloc_contig_pages() to allocate gigantic pages

 include/linux/gfp.h | 14 +++++++-
 mm/cma.c            |  2 +-
 mm/hugetlb.c        | 87 ++++--------------------------------------------
 mm/page_alloc.c     | 95 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
 4 files changed, 110 insertions(+), 88 deletions(-)

-- 
2.13.6