Re: kernel memory allocators

[Mindaugas Rasiukevicius <rmind%netbsd.org@localhost>]

yamt%mwd.biglobe.ne.jp@localhost (YAMAMOTO Takashi) wrote:
> > Benefits I've thought about:
> > - The kmem pools use pool_caches therefor scalability will be much
> > better as the old malloc has a single lock for all access, the pools
> > have one each with a per cpu cache layer.
> > - The old malloc only returns oversized allocations back to the kmem
> > layer but nothing that is in it's bucket, pools can be drained...
> > - Removing one redundant interface in the kernel-api (in the long
> > term, when dropping the malloc wrapper)
> 
> thanks for working on this.
> while i'm all for removing malloc(9), i tend to think it should be done
> by changing the users to use either kmem_alloc or pool_cache, instead of
> making kmem_alloc interrupt-safe.  i don't think there's much demand for
> interrupt-safe variable-sized memory allocations.

Agree.  And possibly consider some pre-allocation mechanisms for certain
subsystems (primarily, network stack), instead of allocating memory in a
direct way from interrupt context.

-- 
Mindaugas