Managing Big Physical Memory Areas in LinuxThe Linux kernel is optimized for managing many small pieces of memory, usually one page at a time. The largest continuous block that can be allocated is 128Kb (default value). Some drivers need much larger blocks, e.g. drivers for framegrabbers, high speed A/D converters or our SCI driver (see Project Arminius). March 1996 Matt Welsh (mdw@cs.cornell.edu) introduced a first bigphysarea patch for Linux 1.3.71 that allowed reservation of a memory area at boot time available for drivers. Now this patch has been extended. Some features of the new version:
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