Re: slab: setup allocators earlier in the boot sequence

Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2009-06-12T08:43:17Z

> > Sure, I think we can do what you want with the patch below.
>
> I don't really like adding branches to slab allocator like this.
> init code all needs to know what services are available, and
> this includes the scheduler if it wants to do anything sleeping
> (including sleeping slab allocations).
>
> Core mm code is the last place to put in workarounds for broken
> callers...

Right, and that's also a reason why I decided for having that
"smellybits" approach since applying a mask is going to be a lot less
cycle consuming than a conditional branch (especially on small embedded
CPUs, the conditional branch on modern stuff should be be reasonably
harmless).

Nick, have you seen my patch ? What do you think ?

Cheers,
Ben.