Re: PATCH killing dead code and design errors in pre6

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Wed, 13 Jan 1999 08:26:18 -0800 (PST)


On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, MOLNAR Ingo wrote:
>
> On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, Marcin Dalecki wrote:
>
> > Or put it again into 2.3 or whatever. [...]
>
> it breaks the interface. The SLAB allocator should not be faulted for
> other code not using it's capabilities ... It's not something obsolete,
> it's a future use ...

The slab code _should_ be faulted for being ugly as hell, and much too
complex for it's uses. I've wanted to remove it several times completely,
going back to the older kmalloc(). I appreciate people looking into
removing features that are hardly ever used and of dubious value.

I bet that 100% of the benefit of slab could be gotten with a really small
skb "cache" in front of a much simpler kmalloc() (where the skb cache
would be a few entries worth of pre-initialized skb's). Or alternatively
just keep sab, but separate the notion of allocation and caching - so that
the 99% that are _not_ interested in constructors would never have to go
through any parts that know about them.

Linus

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/