Re: [RFC PATCH] greatly reduce SLOB external fragmentation

Matt Mackall
2008-07-31T01:13:13Z

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 15:00 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Pekka J Enberg wrote:
> >
> > Subject: [PATCH] binalloc: best-fit allocation with binning
> > From: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
>
> Shoot me now.
>
> > As suggested by Linus,
>
> I'm happy to hear that the thing worked, but I'm not sure how happy I
> should be about yet _another_ allocator. Will it ever end?

I think you can relax: the logical limit is probably two. We want an
allocator that is both optimally fast and scalable on one end and
optimally space-efficient on the other end and we're unlikely to find
one allocator that is simultaneously both. But I don't think there's
much call for things in the middle of the spectrum.

So if this new one (which I haven't looked at yet) beats SLOB in space
usage and simplicity, I'll be happy to see it replace SLOB.

Finally getting rid of SLAB is a much trickier proposition because SLUB
still loses in a few important corner cases.

--
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.