Chapter 8. Allocating Memory

Thus far, we have used kmalloc and kfree for the allocation and freeing of memory. The Linux kernel offers a richer set of memory allocation primitives, however. In this chapter, we look at other ways of using memory in device drivers and how to optimize your system's memory resources. We do not get into how the different architectures actually administer memory. Modules are not involved in issues of segmentation, paging, and so on, since the kernel offers a unified memory management interface to the drivers. In addition, we won't describe the internal details of memory management in this chapter, but defer it to Chapter 15.