Re: 2.1.76, nfs client, and memory fragmentation

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Sun, 28 Dec 1997 22:16:59 +0000 (GMT)

> Well, yes, there's 1<<order pages in the free group whose buddy I'd be trying
> to free, and thus 1<<order pages of buddy... Making an order-d hunk of
> free pages may well be an O(order-d) operation, but shouldn't be worse than
> that, I'd hope...

Given a buddy system a single 1 page allocation that isnt freeable blocks
a 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K and 64K block and so on. Buddy is about the most
non optimal algorithm for creating large allocation spaces.

True its very very fast but now we have SLAB handling the small allocations
we should ditch the buddy allocator IMHO for something more intelligent, or
even something really stupid like first fit. Both will do better than it

Alan