Re: [patch 1/3] slob: rework freelist handling

Christoph Lameter
2007-05-23T17:06:22Z

On Wed, 23 May 2007, Nick Piggin wrote:

> > The following patch may help a little bit but not much. Hmmm... In order
> > to reduce the space further we would also have to shrink all caches when
> > boot is complete. Elimination of useless caches also would be good.
> > Do you really want to go into this deeper?
>
> Well you asked the question what good is SLOB when we have SLUB, and the
> answer, not surprisingly, still seems to be that it is better for memory
> constrained environments.

Well there is not much difference as far as I can see and we have not
focuses on reducing memory wastage by caching.

> I'm happy to test any patches from you. If you are able to make SLUB as
> space efficient as SLOB on small systems, that would be great, and we
> could talk about replacing that too. I think it would be a hefty task,
> though.

We can never get there given that SLOB has always been broken and we do
not want to do the same but I think we can get close. I will sent you
another patch today that will avoid keeping cpu slabs around.