Re: [PATCH RT 00/02] SLOB optimizations

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Tue Dec 20 2005 - 21:29:32 EST


Steven Rostedt wrote:

That looks like quite an undertaking, but may be well worth it. I think
Linux's memory management is starting to show it's age. It's been

What do you mean by this? ie. what parts of it are a problem, and why?

I think that replacing the buddy allocator probably wouldn't be a good
idea because it is really fast and simple for page sized allocations which
are the most common, and it is good at naturally avoiding external
fragmentation. Internal fragmentation is not much of a problem because it
is handled by slab.

I can't see how replacing the buddy allocator with a completely agnostic
range allocator could be a win at all.

Perhaps it would make more sense for bootmem, resources, vmalloc, etc. and
I guess that is what Matt is suggesting.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com -
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/