mtd: create function to perform large allocations

Introduce a common function to handle large, contiguous kmalloc buffer
allocations by exponentially backing off on the size of the requested
kernel transfer buffer until it succeeds or until the requested
transfer buffer size falls below the page size.

This helps ensure the operation can succeed under low-memory, highly-
fragmented situations albeit somewhat more slowly.

Artem: so this patch solves the problem that the kernel tries to kmalloc too
large buffers, which (a) may fail and does fail - people complain about this,
and (b) slows down the system in case of high memory fragmentation, because
the kernel starts dropping caches, writing back, swapping, etc. But we do not
really have to allocate a lot of memory to do the I/O, we may do this even with
as little as one min. I/O unit (NAND page) of RAM. So the idea of this patch is
that if the user asks to read or write a lot, we try to kmalloc a lot, with GFP
flags which make the kernel _not_ drop caches, etc. If we can allocate it - good,
if not - we try to allocate twice as less, and so on, until we reach the min.
I/O unit size, which is our last resort allocation and use the normal
GFP_KERNEL flag.

Artem: re-write the allocation function so that it makes sure the allocated
buffer is aligned to the min. I/O size of the flash.

Signed-off-by: Grant Erickson <marathon96@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Ben Gardiner <bengardiner@nanometrics.ca>
Tested-by: Stefano Babic <sbabic@denx.de>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: David Woodhouse <David.Woodhouse@intel.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/mtd/mtd.h b/include/linux/mtd/mtd.h
index 9d5306bad117..06b489a7605b 100644
--- a/include/linux/mtd/mtd.h
+++ b/include/linux/mtd/mtd.h
@@ -348,6 +348,8 @@ int default_mtd_writev(struct mtd_info *mtd, const struct kvec *vecs,
 int default_mtd_readv(struct mtd_info *mtd, struct kvec *vecs,
 		      unsigned long count, loff_t from, size_t *retlen);
 
+void *mtd_kmalloc_up_to(const struct mtd_info *mtd, size_t *size);
+
 #ifdef CONFIG_MTD_PARTITIONS
 void mtd_erase_callback(struct erase_info *instr);
 #else