kmalloc和vmalloc区别

kmalloc allocates physically contiguous memory, memory which pages are laid consecutively in physical RAM. vmalloc allocates memory which is contiguous in kernel virtual memory space (that means pages allocated that way are not contiguous in RAM, but the kernel sees them as one block).

kmalloc is the preffered way, as long as you don't need very big areas. The trouble is, if you want to do DMA from/to some hardware device, you'll need to use kmalloc, and you'll probably need bigger chunk. The solution is to allocate memory as soon as possible, before memory gets fragmented.

That the kmalloc can malloc max chunk is 128K.