The ZONE_DMA zone includes page frames that can be used by old ISA-based devices by means of the DMA. (The section "Direct Memory Access (DMA)" in Chapter 13 gives further details on DMA.)
The ZONE_DMA and ZONE_NORMAL zones include the "normal" page frames that can be directly accessed by the kernel through the linear mapping in the fourth gigabyte of the linear address space (see the section "Kernel Page Tables" in Chapter 2). Conversely, the ZONE_HIGHMEM zone includes page frames that cannot be directly accessed by the kernel through the linear mapping in the fourth gigabyte of linear address space (see the section "Kernel Mappings of High-Memory Page Frames" later in this chapter). The ZONE_HIGHMEM zone is always empty on 64-bit architectures.
ZONE_NORMAL: Contains page frames of memory at and above 16 MB and below 896 MB.