Technical Document #58

WinDriver does not impose any inherent limitation on the size of the DMA buffer that can be allocated using its DMA APIs. However, the success of the DMA allocation is dependent of the amount of available system resources at the time of the attempted allocation. Therefore, the earlier your try to allocate the buffer, the better your chances of succeeding.

For Contiguous Buffer DMA allocation, there must be enough contiguous physical memory for the allocation. Technical Document #3 explains how you can preallocate contiguous DMA buffers at boot time, on Windows, with version 11.1.0 and above of WinDriver.
When allocating a Scatter/Gather DMA buffer that is larger than 1MB, using the low-level WinDriver API, be sure to set the DMA_LARGE_BUFFER flag in the dwOptions field of the WD_DMA structure that is passed to WD_DMALock(). (When using the high-level WDC_DMASGBufLock() function, this flag is already handled internally by the function.)

The DMA buffer allocated by WinDriver uses page-locked memory, to ensure a safe DMA operation. This memory is allocated from Windows' non-paged kernel pool of memory. The size of this pool is fixed at boot time by a Registry setting. You can increase the allocated memory by increasing the value of the NonPagedPoolSize Registry entry, found under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management.

Sometimes, there is enough contiguous memory, but there are not enough page table entries to map the memory — refer to Technical Document #59 for more information.

Even after increasing the value of the relevant Registry entries, the memory allocation might still fail, specifically when trying to allocate a very large buffer (such as 1GB). The solution in this case is to try decreasing the size of the buffer you are trying to lock, until you succeed.

Please note that the WinDriver DMA allocation APIs ((WDC_DMAContigBufLock() / WDC_DMASGBufLock() / WD_DMALock()) also map the physical memory of the allocated buffer into virtual user mode space. Therefore, there must also be enough free virtual memory to enable the mapping of the entire buffer into the user space.