-
Matt Mackall authored
configurable replacement for slab allocator This adds a CONFIG_SLAB option under CONFIG_EMBEDDED. When CONFIG_SLAB is disabled, the kernel falls back to using the 'SLOB' allocator. SLOB is a traditional K&R/UNIX allocator with a SLAB emulation layer, similar to the original Linux kmalloc allocator that SLAB replaced. It's signicantly smaller code and is more memory efficient. But like all similar allocators, it scales poorly and suffers from fragmentation more than SLAB, so it's only appropriate for small systems. It's been tested extensively in the Linux-tiny tree. I've also stress-tested it with make -j 8 compiles on a 3G SMP+PREEMPT box (not recommended). Here's a comparison for otherwise identical builds, showing SLOB saving nearly half a megabyte of RAM: $ size vmlinux* text data bss dec hex filename 3336372 529360 190812 4056544 3de5e0 vmlinux-slab 3323208 527948 190684 4041840 3dac70 vmlinux-slob $ size mm/{slab,slob}.o ...
10cef602