Re: [PATCH 2/3]: xvmalloc memory allocator

[Pekka Enberg]

On Tue, 17 Mar 2009, Nitin Gupta wrote:
>> Creating slabs for sizes in range, say, [32, 3/4*PAGE_SIZE] separated by
>> 64bytes
>> will require 48 slabs! Then for slab of each size class will have wastage
>> due to
>> unused slab objects in each class.
>> Larger difference in slab sizes (and thus small no. of them), will surely
>> cause too much
>> wastage due to internal fragmentation.

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Christoph Lameter
<cl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The slabs that match existing other slabs of similar sizes will be aliased
> and not created. Create the 48 slabs and you likely will only use 10 real
> additional ones. The rest will just be pointing to existing ones.

Yup. One thing I don't quite understand is why you need all the 48
caches in the first place. Allocation sizes tend to be clustered and I
would have imagined you'd see that when compressing page sized chunks
as well. Using kmemtrace to analyze the exact reason for the bad
fragmentation would probably be helpful.
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