Basically, yes, but that's an oversimplification. We actually use page tables
everywhere, but the conversion is simply +/- 0xC0000000 for the NORMAL zone, so
we can skip most of the fancy VM work and just use a trivial macro. vmalloc can
allocate large chunks of virtually contiguous memory even when the physical
memory is heavily fragmented, and since we've set aside address space for it,
it's visible in all process contexts.
vmalloc is handy sometimes because it can complete even if there's no memory
free when it's called, since the VM will swap out user pages and then return
those remapped into the vmalloc address space. Unfortunately, we can't use
vmalloc anywhere we want to use DMA because it will be accessed without the MMU.
Worse, we also can't use it in any path that could be called while trying to
free memory, due to recursion issues, which substantially limits its utility in
the kernel. Some people *cough*OpenAFS*cough* use it carelessly and get all
kinds of exciting panics under rare and difficult-to-reproduce load conditions.
-- Chris
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