[c] What is the difference between vmalloc and kmalloc?

I've googled around and found most people advocating the use of kmalloc, as you're guaranteed to get contiguous physical blocks of memory. However, it also seems as though kmalloc can fail if a contiguous physical block that you want can't be found.
What are the advantages of having a contiguous block of memory? Specifically, why would I need to have a contiguous physical block of memory in a system call? Is there any reason I couldn't just use vmalloc?
Finally, if I were to allocate memory during the handling of a system call, should I specify GFP_ATOMIC? Is a system call executed in an atomic context?

GFP_ATOMIC
The allocation is high-priority and does not sleep. This is the flag to use in interrupt handlers, bottom halves and other situations where you cannot sleep.

GFP_KERNEL This is a normal allocation and might block. This is the flag to use in process context code when it is safe to sleep.

The kmalloc() & vmalloc() functions are a simple interface for obtaining kernel memory in byte-sized chunks.

1. The kmalloc() function guarantees that the pages are physically contiguous (and virtually contiguous).

2. The vmalloc() function works in a similar fashion to kmalloc(), except it allocates memory that is only virtually contiguous and not necessarily physically contiguous.

On a 32-bit system, kmalloc() returns the kernel logical address (its a virtual address though) which has the direct mapping (actually with constant offset) to physical address. This direct mapping ensures that we get a contiguous physical chunk of RAM. Suited for DMA where we give only the initial pointer and expect a contiguous physical mapping thereafter for our operation.

vmalloc() returns the kernel virtual address which in turn might not be having a contiguous mapping on physical RAM. Useful for large memory allocation and in cases where we don't care about that the memory allocated to our process is continuous also in Physical RAM.

One of other differences is kmalloc will return logical address (else you specify GPF_HIGHMEM). Logical addresses are placed in "low memory" (in the first gigabyte of physical memory) and are mapped directly to physical addresses (use __pa macro to convert it). This property implies kmalloced memory is continuous memory.

In other hand, Vmalloc is able to return virtual addresses from "high memory". These addresses cannot be converted in physical addresses in a direct fashion (you have to use virt_to_page function).

In short, vmalloc and kmalloc both could fix fragmentation. vmalloc use memory mappings to fix external fragmentation; kmalloc use slab to fix internal frgamentation. Fot what it's worth, kmalloc also has many other advantages.

What are the advantages of having a contiguous block of memory? Specifically, why would I need to have a contiguous physical block of memory in a system call? Is there any reason I couldn't just use vmalloc?

From Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" on vmalloc:

kmalloc is the preferred way, as long as you don't need very big areas. The trouble is, if you want to do DMA from/to some hardware device, you'll need to use kmalloc, and you'll probably need bigger chunk. The solution is to allocate memory as soon as possible, before memory gets fragmented.

Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love (Chapter 12, page 244 in 3rd edition) answers this very clearly.

Yes, physically contiguous memory is not required in many of the cases. Main reason for kmalloc being used more than vmalloc in kernel is performance. The book explains, when big memory chunks are allocated using vmalloc, kernel has to map the physically non-contiguous chunks (pages) into a single contiguous virtual memory region. Since the memory is virtually contiguous and physically non-contiguous, several virtual-to-physical address mappings will have to be added to the page table. And in the worst case, there will be (size of buffer/page size) number of mappings added to the page table.

This also adds pressure on TLB (the cache entries storing recent virtual to physical address mappings) when accessing this buffer. This can lead to thrashing.

Short answer: download Linux Device Drivers and read the chapter on memory management.

Seriously, there are a lot of subtle issues related to kernel memory management that you need to understand - I spend a lot of my time debugging problems with it.

vmalloc() is very rarely used, because the kernel rarely uses virtual memory. kmalloc() is what is typically used, but you have to know what the consequences of the different flags are and you need a strategy for dealing with what happens when it fails - particularly if you're in an interrupt handler, like you suggested.