3 ms·

I see big boost for high-speed network drivers.

• viraptor 7y ago
  Why? I expect all high speed network drivers to be already zero-alloc in their sending path. We have zero-copy interfaces as well. Is any network operation really held up by allocs anymore?
  • cesarb 7y ago
    And even if they did allocate in the send or receive path, it would probably be with kmalloc (possibly with GFP_ATOMIC), not with vmalloc.
• Unklejoe 7y ago
  How come? Are skbuffs allocated with vmalloc? I thought they were allocated from low memory.
• kazinator 7y ago
  Drivers mostly allocate things from kmalloc, not vmalloc. vmalloc is only used for large allocations that exceed the maximum size that kmalloc can provide. It's traditionally not expected to "churn" either. One use for vmalloc is for allocating loadable modules: when you insmod a driver, the space comes from vmalloc. Needless to say, there are few use cases for inserting and removing a driver thousands of times per second.