Re: [PATCH] net: don't use kvzalloc for DMA memory

[Eric Dumazet]

On 04/18/2018 10:55 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:

> Imagine you want to pass some data to card.
> Natural thing is to just put it in a variable and start DMA.
> However DMA API disallows stack access nowdays,
> so it's natural to put this within struct device.
> 
> See e.g.
> 
> 	commit a725ee3e44e39dab1ec82cc745899a785d2a555e
> 	Author: Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx>
> 	Date:   Mon Jul 18 15:34:49 2016 -0700
> 
> 	    virtio-net: Remove more stack DMA
>

Andy just moved the problem to another one, since at that time we already
had vmalloc() fallback for at least 2 years.

Note that my original patch had :

p = kzalloc(alloc_size, GFP_KERNEL | __GFP_NOWARN | __GFP_REPEAT);
if (!p)
      p = vzalloc(alloc_size);

So really, normal (less than PAGE_SIZE) allocations would have almost-zero-chance to end up to vmalloc(one_page)