On 2013-03-06 11:07, David Young wrote:
General comment: ISTM that vmem(9) is, and was always intended to be, a general-purpose allocator of number intervals that may or may not correspond to memory addresses. I have actually used it as such. It is actually badly named: extent(9) is a better name, but it's taken. Let us keep that in mind.
Yes -- the paper [1] referenced at the top of subr_vmem.c says that it's a general number interval allocator. The paper calls it vmem, which is probably why the files/functions are named *vmem*. I agree that it's not a great name, but keeping it consistent with the paper (assuming the implementation matches the paper) has at least a little value.
-Richard [1] http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix01/bonwick.html