On Friday 14 December 2007 07:39, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

Provide a method to get the upper bound on the pages needed to
allocate a given number of objects from a given kmem_cache.

This lays the foundation for a generic reserve framework as presented
in a later patch in this series. This framework needs to convert
object demand (kmalloc() bytes, kmem_cache_alloc() objects) to pages.

And hence the big idea that all reserve accounting can be done in units
of pages, allowing the use of a single global reserve that already 
exists.

The other big idea here is that reserve accounting can be independent of 
the actual resource allocations.  This is a powerful idea which we may 
not have explained clearly yet.

Daniel