Re: slab: setup allocators earlier in the boot sequence

Pekka Enberg
2009-06-12T07:46:15Z

Hi Benjamin,

On Fri, 2009-06-12 at 17:34 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > I don't like that approach at all. Fixing all the call sites... we are
> > changing things all over the place, we'll certainly miss some, and
> > honestly, it's none of the business of things like vmalloc to know about
> > things like what kmalloc flags are valid and when...
>
> Oh and btw, your patch alone doesn't fix powerpc, because it's missing
> a whole bunch of GFP_KERNEL's in the arch code... You would have to
> grep the entire kernel for things that check slab_is_available() and
> even then you'll be missing some.

Ah, the patch is not against current git so, yeah, I missed some.

On Fri, 2009-06-12 at 17:39 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> For example, slab_is_available() didn't always exist, and so in the
> early days on powerpc, we used a mem_init_done global that is set form
> mem_init() (not perfect but works in practice). And we still have code
> using that to do the test.

IMHO, that would be a bug :-). But anyway, see the other thread for my
suggestion how to do what you want in a slightly cleaner way.

Pekka