On Sun, 31 May 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I suspect the "use page allocator" is historical - ie the tty layer
> originally always did that, and then when people wanted to suppotr smaller
> areas than one page, they added the special case. I have this dim memory
> of the _original_ kmalloc not handling page-sized allocations well (due to
> embedded size/pointer overheads), but I think all current allocators are
> perfectly happy to allocate PAGE_SIZE buffers without slop.
>
> If I'm right, then we could just use kmalloc/kfree unconditionally. Pekka?
Yes. They do that in various ways. SLOB/SLUB will fall back to the
page allocator for large allocation sizes.