Re: [PATCH 3/12 2.4] e1000 - use vmalloc for data structures not shared with h/w

On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 05:38:11PM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote:

quoted

No, it's not.  vmalloc needs virtual space that's rather limited (e.g. 64MB
on PAE x86) in addition to physical memory.  Unless you do really big
allocations stay away from vmalloc.

How big is really big? 64K? 256K? 1M?

Well, the VM deals with big-order (aka bigger than page size) allocations
rather bad, so for allocation during any I/O I'd stick to allocation smaller
than that (and certainly no vmalloc!), for init-time allocations order 1 is
fine, maybe even order 2 or three.