After this documentation was released in July 2003, I was approached by Prentice Hall and asked to write a book on the Linux VM under the Bruce Peren's Open Book Series.

The book is available and called simply "Understanding The Linux Virtual Memory Manager". There is a lot of additional material in the book that is not available here, including details on later 2.4 kernels, introductions to 2.6, a whole new chapter on the shared memory filesystem, coverage of TLB management, a lot more code commentary, countless other additions and clarifications and a CD with lots of cool stuff on it. This material (although now dated and lacking in comparison to the book) will remain available although I obviously encourge you to buy the book from your favourite book store :-) . As the book is under the Bruce Perens Open Book Series, it will be available 90 days after appearing on the book shelves which means it is not available right now. When it is available, it will be downloadable from http://www.phptr.com/perens so check there for more information.

To be fully clear, this webpage is not the actual book.

8. Non-Contiguous Memory Allocation

It is preferable when dealing with large amounts of memory to use physically contiguous physical pages in memory both for cache related and memory access latency issues. Unfortunately, due to external fragmentation problems with the buddy allocator, this is not always possible. Linux provides a mechanism via vmalloc() where non-contiguous physically memory can be used that is contiguous in virtual memory.

An area is reserved in the virtual address space between VMALLOC_START and VMALLOC_END. The location of VMALLOC_START depends on the amount of available physical memory but the region will always be at least VMALLOC_RESERVE in size, which on the x86 is 128MiB. The exact size of the region is discussed in Section 5.1.

The page tables in this region are adjusted as necessary to point to physical pages which are allocated with the normal physical page allocator. This means that allocation must be a multiple of the hardware page size. As allocations require altering the kernel page tables, there is a limitation on how much memory can be mapped with vmalloc() as only the virtual addresses space between VMALLOC_START and VMALLOC_END is available. As a result, it is used sparingly in the core kernel. In 2.4.20, it is only used for storing the swap map information (see Chapter 12) and for loading kernel modules into memory.

This small chapter begins with a description of how the kernel tracks which areas in the vmalloc address space are used and how regions are allocated and freed.