Re: [UnifiedV4 00/16] The Unified slab allocator (V4)

[Richard Kennedy <richard@rsk.demon.co.uk>]

On 06/10/10 09:01, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> (Adding more people who've taken interest in slab performance in the
> past to CC.)
> 
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> wrote:
>> V3->V4:
>> - Lots of debugging
>> - Performance optimizations (more would be good)...
>> - Drop per slab locking in favor of per node locking for
>>  partial lists (queuing implies freeing large amounts of objects
>>  to per node lists of slab).
>> - Implement object expiration via reclaim VM logic.
>>
>> The following is a release of an allocator based on SLAB
>> and SLUB that integrates the best approaches from both allocators. The
>> per cpu queuing is like in SLAB whereas much of the infrastructure
>> comes from SLUB.
>>
>> After this patches SLUB will track the cpu cache contents
>> like SLAB attemped to. There are a number of architectural differences:
>>
>> 1. SLUB accurately tracks cpu caches instead of assuming that there
>>   is only a single cpu cache per node or system.
>>
>> 2. SLUB object expiration is tied into the page reclaim logic. There
>>   is no periodic cache expiration.
>>
>> 3. SLUB caches are dynamically configurable via the sysfs filesystem.
>>
>> 4. There is no per slab page metadata structure to maintain (aside
>>   from the object bitmap that usually fits into the page struct).
>>
>> 5. Has all the resiliency and diagnostic features of SLUB.
>>
>> The unified allocator is a merging of SLUB with some queuing concepts from
>> SLAB and a new way of managing objects in the slabs using bitmaps. Memory
>> wise this is slightly more inefficient than SLUB (due to the need to place
>> large bitmaps --sized a few words--in some slab pages if there are more
>> than BITS_PER_LONG objects in a slab) but in general does not increase space
>> use too much.
>>
>> The SLAB scheme of not touching the object during management is adopted.
>> The unified allocator can efficiently free and allocate cache cold objects
>> without causing cache misses.
>>


Hi Christoph,
What tree are these patches against ? I'm getting patch failures on the
main tree.

regards
Richard