Cat on (RAM) steroids

[Eli Billauer]

Well, the real reason is that the buffers in the kernel are allocated as 
DMA memory. So it's not just a matter of getting hold of a lot of 
memory, but a lot of memory which is continuous in its physical space. 
Or more precisely, a lot of continuous buffers which are fairly large. 
One could, of course, copy the data in the smaller DMA buffers to larger 
buffers by virtue of some bottom-half interrupt handler (i.e. a 
tasklet), but I think that's a safe way to stop your code from making it 
to the kernel tree.


Besides, I have a faint memory of a limitation on the total RAM 
allocatable inside the kernel. Was it 512MB? Has this limitation vanished?


   Eli


Oron Peled wrote:

> I fail to see why the kernel driver would be more limited in RAM
> allocation than the utility you want?
>
> After all, RAM is RAM if you have enough for the application to
> use (you asked for non-pageable memory), than why can't the
> kernel driver allocate it just the same and be done with it?
>
> Bye,
>
>   


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