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Dave Hansen authored
Once a structure goes over PAGE_SIZE*2, we see occasional allocation failures. Some people have chosen to switch over to things like vmalloc() that will let them keep array-like access to such a large structures. But, vmalloc() has plenty of downsides. Here's an alternative. I think it's what Andrew was suggesting here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/7/2/518 I call it a flexible array. It does all of its work in PAGE_SIZE bits, so never does an order>0 allocation. The base level has PAGE_SIZE-2*sizeof(int) bytes of storage for pointers to the second level. So, with a 32-bit arch, you get about 4MB (4183112 bytes) of total storage when the objects pack nicely into a page. It is half that on 64-bit because the pointers are twice the size. There's a table detailing this in the code. There are kerneldocs for the functions, but here's an overview: flex_array_alloc() - dynamically allocate a base structure flex_array_free() - free the array and all of the second-...
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