Christoph Lameter [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, 17 May 2005, David S. Miller wrote:

quoted

quoted

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.

Oww.. We need a NUMA aware vmalloc for this?  

I think the e1000 driver is being a bit insane there.  I figure that
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?