GitLab

Currently a call to dma_pool_alloc() with a ___GFP_ZERO flag returns a
non-zeroed memory region.

This patchset adds support for the __GFP_ZERO flag to dma_pool_alloc(),
adds 2 wrapper functions for allocing zeroed memory from a pool, and
provides a coccinelle script for finding & replacing instances of
dma_pool_alloc() followed by memset(0) with a single dma_pool_zalloc()
call.

There was some concern that this always calls memset() to zero, instead
of passing __GFP_ZERO into the page allocator.
[https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/7/15/881]

I ran a test on my system to get an idea of how often dma_pool_alloc()
calls into pool_alloc_page().

After Boot:	[   30.119863] alloc_calls:541, page_allocs:7
After an hour:	[ 3600.951031] alloc_calls:9566, page_allocs:12
After copying 1GB file onto a USB drive:
		[ 4260.657148] alloc_calls:17225, page_allocs:12

It doesn't look like dma_pool_alloc() calls down to the page allocator
very often (at least on my system).
...