What is bigphysarea?

Answer 1

Bigphysarea; is a driver which allocates a big piece of memory during boottime and returns the entire piece or parts of it to a requesting driver. Some hardware requires memory in physical continuous blocks. Howevery, the longer your Linux system is running, the more main memory is getting allocated and freed in different sizes. This leads to the fenomenen called 'memory fragmentation'. And the end result of this all is a machine which has enough memory left, but scattered all over the place, thereby failing our drivers with an 'out of memory'. Prime examples of these hardware are soundcards which need to be initialized and the above mentioned framegrabber.