Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd Edition

Noncontiguous Memory Area Management

We already know that it is preferable to map memory areas into sets of contiguous page frames, thus making better use of the cache and achieving lower average memory access times. Nevertheless, if the requests for memory areas are infrequent, it makes sense to consider an allocation scheme based on noncontiguous page frames accessed through contiguous linear addresses . The main advantage of this schema is to avoid external fragmentation, while the disadvantage is that it is necessary to fiddle with the kernel Page Tables. Clearly, the size of a noncontiguous memory area must be a multiple of 4,096. Linux uses noncontiguous memory areas in several ways — for instance, to allocate data structures for active swap areas (see the section "Activating and Deactivating a Swap Area" in Chapter 17), to allocate space for a module (see Appendix B), or to allocate buffers to some I/O drivers. Furthermore, noncontiguous memory areas provide yet another way to make use of high memory page frames (see the later section "Allocating a Noncontiguous Memory Area“).

Linear Addresses of Noncontiguous Memory Areas

To find a free range of linear addresses, we can look in the area starting from PAGE_OFFSET (usually 0xc0000000, the beginning of the fourth gigabyte). Figure 8-7 shows how the fourth gigabyte linear addresses are used:

• The beginning of the area includes the linear addresses that map the first 896 MB of RAM (see the section "Process Page Tables" in ...