Subject: Re: lockdep complaints in slab allocator
From: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
To: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>,
       Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
       "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
       Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0911251356130.11347@chino.kir.corp.google.com>
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Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:06:47 -0600
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On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 13:59 -0800, David Rientjes wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009, Matt Mackall wrote:
> 
> > I'm afraid I have only anecdotal reports from SLOB users, and embedded
> > folks are notorious for lack of feedback, but I only need a few people
> > to tell me they're shipping 100k units/mo to be confident that SLOB is
> > in use in millions of devices.
> > 
> 
> It's much more popular than I had expected; do you think it would be 
> possible to merge slob's core into another allocator or will it require 
> seperation forever?

Probably not. It's actually a completely different kind of allocator
than the rest as it doesn't actually use "slabs" at all. It's instead a
slab-like interface on a traditional heap allocator. SLAB/SLUB/SLQB have
much more in common - their biggest differences are about their approach
to scalability/locking issues.

On the upside, SLOB is easily the simplest of the bunch.

-- 
http://selenic.com : development and support for Mercurial and Linux


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