ion/free tests don't show any arithmetic relation between the allocation time and fragmentation but the best-fit algorithm is sometime able to perform the allocation when the first-fit can't. This new algorithm help to remove static allocations on ESRAM, a small but fast on-chip RAM of few KB, used for high-performance uses cases like DMA linked lists, graphic accelerators, encoders/decoders. On the Ux500 (in the ARM tree) we have define 5 ESRAM banks of 128 KB each and use of static allocations becomes unmaintainable: cd arch/arm/mach-ux500 && grep -r ESRAM . ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:/* Base address and bank offsets for ESRAM */ ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_ESRAM_BASE 0x40000000 ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_ESRAM_BANK_SIZE 0x00020000 ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_ESRAM_BANK0 U8500_ESRAM_BASE ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_ESRAM_BANK1 (U8500_ESRAM_BASE + U8500_ESRAM_BANK_SIZE) ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_ESRAM_BANK2 (U8500_ESRAM_BANK1 + U8500_ESRAM_BANK_SIZE) ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_ESRAM_BANK3 (U8500_ESRAM_BANK2 + U8500_ESRAM_BANK_SIZE) ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_ESRAM_BANK4 (U8500_ESRAM_BANK3 + U8500_ESRAM_BANK_SIZE) ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_ESRAM_DMA_LCPA_OFFSET 0x10000 ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_DMA_LCPA_BASE (U8500_ESRAM_BANK0 + U8500_ESRAM_DMA_LCPA_OFFSET) ./include/mach/db8500-regs.h:#define U8500_DMA_LCLA_BASE U8500_ESRAM_BANK4 I want to use genalloc to do dynamic allocations but I need to be able to fine tune the allocation algorithm. I my case best-fit algorithm give better results than first-fit, but it will not be true for every use case. Signed-off-by: Benjamin Gaignard Cc: Huang Ying Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds