Re: [PATCH] x86: Fix DMI out of memory problems

[Parag Warudkar <parag.warudkar@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, Andi Kleen wrote:

> 
> FWIW the ff tree has patches to allow "really early allocation" now.
> They could be used for this. I didn't implement that for i386 though,
> so that would still need some variant of your patch.

Just to clarify -The allocation failure currently happens only on x86_64 - 
on i386 it uses alloc_bootmem and does not fail.

Regardless though this patch is a good idea for both i386 and x86_64 - 
there is no point in repeatedly allocating memory for large empty strings 
no matter where it comes from, which was the point of this patch.

> 
> Disadvantage right now: e820 memory allocation currently rounds to pages
> always. I intend to fix that though because it also wastes memory
> with the memnodemap for once.
> 
So looks like currently we have to at least use 4K with these patches - 
that would be at least 8 times more than what is actually used after this 
patch unless we also fit in some other early alloc in this 4k. I will keep 
an eye on the ff tree though - when you get to fix it we can switch all early allocs to use it.

Thanks

Parag