From: Christoph Lameter <redacted>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] NUMA aware allocation of transmit and receive buffers for e1000
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 19:52:38 -0700 (PDT)

quoted

quoted

-	txdr->buffer_info = vmalloc(size);
+	txdr->buffer_info = kmalloc_node(size, GFP_KERNEL, node);

How come that this is safe to do

Because physically contiguous memory is usually better than virtually 
contiguous memory? Any reason that physically contiguous memory will 
break the driver?

The issue is whether size can end up being too large for
kmalloc() to satisfy, whereas vmalloc() would be able to
handle it.