linux-kernel - Re: [patch 09/10] Remove the SLOB allocator for 2.6.23

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Message-ID: <20070709215724.GV11115@waste.org>
Date:	Mon, 9 Jul 2007 16:57:24 -0500
From:	Matt Mackall <mpm@...enic.com>
To:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, Christoph Lameter <clameter@....com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...r.kernel.org,
	suresh.b.siddha@...el.com, corey.d.gough@...el.com,
	Pekka Enberg <penberg@...helsinki.fi>
Subject: Re: [patch 09/10] Remove the SLOB allocator for 2.6.23

On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 11:02:24AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Guys, look at this the other way.  Suppose we only had slub, and someone
> came along and said "here's a whole new allocator which saves 4.5k of
> text", would we merge it on that basis?  Hell no, it's not worth it.  What
> we might do is to get motivated to see if we can make slub less porky under
> appropriate config settings.

Well I think we would obviously throw out SLAB and SLUB if they
weren't somewhat faster than SLOB. They're much more problematic and
one of the big features that Christoph's pushing is a fix for a
problem that SLOB simply doesn't have: huge numbers of SLAB/SLUB pages
being held down by small numbers of objects. 

> Let's not get sentimental about these things: in general, if there's any
> reasonable way in which we can rid ourselves of any code at all, we should
> do so, no?

I keep suggesting a Voyager Replacement Fund, but James isn't
interested.

But seriously, I don't think it should be at all surprising that the
allocator that's most appropriate for machines with < 32MB of RAM is
different than the one for machines with > 1TB of RAM.

The maintenance overhead of SLOB is fairly minimal. The biggest
outstanding SLOB problem is nommu's rather broken memory size
reporting.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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