What is the meaning of GFP [LWN.net]

What is the meaning of GFP

Posted Mar 26, 2008 8:55 UTC (Wed) by dale77 (subscriber, #1490)
In reply to: What is the meaning of GFP by pr1268
Parent article: Atomic context and kernel API design

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.

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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.