On Sep 18, 2009, at 9:10 AM, David Laight wrote:
It is all rather similar to the proliferation of memory pools - for things where 'malloc' would be fine.
The old-school kernel malloc was almost never "fine" ... but pools have another advantage -- use of a direct-mapped segment on architectures so-equipped. And for those not so-equipped, greatly reduced pressure on kmem_map.
Now, if we could only get rid of kmem_map / kernel malloc completely (which requires making it illegal to allocate memory in interrupt context).
-- thorpej