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Atomic context and kernel API design
Atomic context and kernel API design
Posted Mar 26, 2008 3:24 UTC (Wed) by kjp (subscriber, #39639)Parent article: Atomic context and kernel API design
What the hell does GFP stand for?
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What is the meaning of GFP
Posted Mar 26, 2008 5:42 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
My guess is "Get Free Page" (with various qualifier suffixes, i.e. GFP_KERNEL, GFP_ATOMIC, GFP_DMA, etc.).
It's strange that, after nearly an hour of grepping files throughout the entire Linux source tree, I was unable to come up with a meaning. My search took me all over the mm/, include/linux/, Documentation/, and kernel/ directories, but to no avail. The meaning of GFP_KERNEL via a Google search (going five pages deep) was equally elusive!
I suppose there are many kernel developers out there who know its true meaning whilst snickering over my frustrated search...
What is the meaning of GFP
Posted Mar 26, 2008 8:55 UTC (Wed) by dale77 (subscriber, #1490) [Link]
http://lwn.net/Articles/23042/ Oops. But that is the guy who wrote about that in_atomic ref. Perhaps we need another opinion ;-) Just kidding. Keep up the good work corbet.
Get Free Page
Posted Mar 26, 2008 10:02 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
I was right! And to think I extrapolated "get free page" from the context of where I found a bunch of GFP_* macros in my search. Thank you, Dale77.
For those with further interest, the GFP_* macros appear to be a set of bitmasks, many of which are defined as bitwise-ORed versions of others (ref. <Linux source>/include/kernel/gfp.h). These are used to set parameters to allocating virtual memory (and what to do in case of failure). But, I'm certain a lot of LWN readers already know this.
I have a lot to learn about the internal workings of the Linux kernel, as well as my online search skills--I'm certain a search here at LWN would have led me to that link.
Get Free Page
Posted Mar 26, 2008 12:08 UTC (Wed) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link]
Google's "site:" feature is very handy. For example, to search just LWN, put "site:lwn.net" at the start of your search string, like this.
What is the meaning of GFP
Posted Mar 31, 2008 7:43 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Well on Windows you get General Protection Faults, in Linux it must therefore be General Fault Protection :-)