preallocate_image_pages(9)

✨ preallocate_image_pages(9) ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to the Kernel API Manual entry for preallocate_image_pages — yes it's a section 9 page, yes it's about hibernation, and yes we're gonna get through it together 💅

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🎀 NAME 🎀

preallocate_image_pages — allocate a number of pages for the hibernation image 💖

Like, it goes and grabs page frames ahead of time so the hibernation image has somewhere to live. Very "reserving the good seats before the group chat shows up" energy 🫶

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

unsigned long preallocate_image_pages (unsigned long nr_pages , gfp_t
mask );

That's the whole signature, no cap — it hands you back an unsigned long, takes an unsigned long and a gfp_t, and that's it 🔥

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🦋 ARGUMENTS 🦋

• nr_pages — the number of page frames to allocate. how many we're grabbin', basically 🍓
• mask — the GFP flags to use for the allocation. the vibe/mode the allocator runs in ✨

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

Return value: the number of page frames actually allocated 👑

real talk: that's literally the whole description in the original. it allocates, and it tells you how many it really got — which, lowkey, is the useful part, because "asked for" and "got" are not always the same number 🙈

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

so there's a whole little friend group here, and they all live in the kernel file ./kernel/power/snapshot.c 📁 — go say hi to all of them:

• get_image_page(9)
• free_image_page(9)
• alloc_rtree_node(9)
• free_mem_extents(9)
• create_mem_extents(9)
• memory_bm_next_pfn(9)
• mark_nosave_pages(9)
• create_basic_memory_bitmaps(9)
• free_basic_memory_bitmaps(9)
• snapshot_additional_pages(9)
• count_free_highmem_pages(9)
• count_highmem_pages(9)
• count_data_pages(9)
• swsusp_free(9)
• free_unnecessary_pages(9)
• minimum_image_size(9)
• hibernate_preallocate_memory(9)
• pack_pfns(9)
• snapshot_read_next(9)
• unpack_orig_pfns(9)
• count_highmem_image_pages(9)
• prepare_highmem_image(9)
• copy_last_highmem_page(9)
• prepare_image(9)
• snapshot_write_next(9)
• restore_highmem(9)

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and that's the whole page, bestie, you ate that 🧚

this little cutie lives in ./kernel/power and the manual is dated October 2026 — so yeah, future-dated and still serving 💅✨ bye bestie, go hibernate something 🦋