> On Sat, 20 Feb 1999, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > I think we need some way to reserve DMA:ble memory in some early stage of
> > > booting up the 'puter... or then the memory allocation crap should be
> > > redone once again from scratch ;)
> > Then you might as well load the stuff at boot time. This is an issue that
> > eventually has to get sorted. Im now sitting on yet another sound card that
> > wants 1->4Mb of memory in 256K blocks.
>
> The problem is that many drivers allocate memory on the fly, not just
> allocate at load and hold it. So even sound drivers that are compiled into
> the kernel can fail when trying to grab dma memory. So all drivers would
> have to change to grabbing and holding ram rather than dynamic.
>
> Probably the 'reserve Xmb below 16mb for dma memory' is the best solution.
> eg in lilo.conf something like
> append = "dmaram=2m"
>
Exactly my point...
Now who wants to implement this? as I know nothing about Linux's MM ;)
(of course the other solution would be modifying the MM to do some more
aggressive try_to_get_dmable_memory type thingies)
And this raises a question about Linux's MM: How hard is it for the kernel
to relocate things in physical memory?
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