Re: [patch][rfc] acpi: do not use kmem caches

Nick Piggin
2008-12-01T18:10:47Z

On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 12:53:04PM -0500, Len Brown wrote:
>
> > Or at least stop arguing and throwing bureaucratic stones in the way of
> > those wanting to sort out this mess.
>
> I think we all would be better served if there were more facts
> and fewer insults on this thread, can we do that please?
>
> I do not think the extra work we need to do for ACPICA changes
> are a significant hurdle here. We will do what is best for Linux --
> which is what we though we were doing when we changed ACPICA
> so Linux could use native caching in the first place.
>
> The only question that should be on the table here is how
> to make Linux be the best it can be.

If there is good reason to keep them around, I'm fine with that.
I think Pekka's suggestion of not doing unions but have better
typing in the code and then allocate the smaller types from
kmalloc sounds like a good idea.

If the individual kmem caches are here to stay, then the
kmem_cache_shrink call should go away. Either way we can delete
some code from slab.

The OS agnostic code that implements its own allocator is kind
of a hack -- I don't understand why you would turn on allocator
debugging and then circumvent it because you find it too slow.
But I will never maintain that so if it is compiled out for
Linux, then OK.