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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-level pages
flex_array_free_parts() - free the second-level pages, but
not the base (for static bases)
flex_array_put() - copy into the array at the given index
flex_array_get() - copy out of the array at the given index
flex_array_prealloc() - preallocate the second-level pages
between the given indexes to
guarantee no allocs will occur at
put() time.
We could also potentially just pass the "element_size" into each of the
API functions instead of storing it internally. That would get us one
more base pointer on 32-bit.
I've been testing this by running it in userspace. The header and patch
that I've been using are here, as well as the little script I'm using to
generate the size table which goes in the kerneldocs.
http://sr71.net/~dave/linux/flexarray/
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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