[PATCH 0/1] mm: Remove the SLAB allocator

From: Tobin C. Harding
Date: Tue Apr 09 2019 - 22:48:05 EST


Recently a 2 year old bug was found in the SLAB allocator that crashes
the kernel. This seems to imply that not that many people are using the
SLAB allocator.

Currently we have 3 slab allocators. Two is company three is a crowd -
let's get rid of one.

- The SLUB allocator has been the default since 2.6.23
- The SLOB allocator is kinda sexy. Its only 664 LOC, the general
design is outlined in KnR, and there is an optimisation taken from
Knuth - say no more.

If you are using the SLAB allocator please speak now or forever hold your peace ...

Testing:

Build kernel with `make defconfig` (on x86_64 machine) followed by `make
kvmconfig`. Then do the same and manually select SLOB. Boot both
kernels in Qemu.


thanks,
Tobin.


Tobin C. Harding (1):
mm: Remove SLAB allocator

include/linux/slab.h | 26 -
kernel/cpu.c | 5 -
mm/slab.c | 4493 ------------------------------------------
mm/slab.h | 31 +-
mm/slab_common.c | 20 +-
5 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 4570 deletions(-)
delete mode 100644 mm/slab.c

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2.21.0