Re: [Dev] Change kmalloc to vmalloc when loading firmware

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 12:55:30PM +0530, Amit Kucheria wrote:

You could, but vmalloc can be slower in most cases since it needs to create a virtual contiguous map of fragmented memory. And it seems from commit 6e03a201bb that it was changed from vmalloc to kmalloc for speed reasons.

IIRC there's also a need to treat vmalloc() memory differently to kmalloc() when mapping into a scatterlist for DMA at least if there isn't an IOMMU in play.