Re: RFC: Slab-o-rama (after Rene's suggestion)

Hugo Santos wrote on Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:53:48 +0100:
> The resource allocator Bonwick describes, "vmem", has constant
> allocation time for one of the allocation algorithms which performs
> very decently. We start with a large segment which contemplates all of
> the resources (for instance [0, 0xffffffff)) and then just segment as
> required. It uses external boundary tags to both track the resource
> and merge back (coalesce) resources which were returned to the
> allocator. We are only limited by memory. I suggest reading his paper,
> it's nice.
> 
>   http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/bonwick01magazines.html

Thanks, was interesting reading.  Though the use of gun magazine terminology
was confusing - a full magazine is actually full of unallocated items.  While
an empty one is fully allocated.  At least they were consistent in terminology.
Anyway, having something that's scalable for multiple CPUs is particularly
good for Haiku!

Wish they had a better name than "vmem" for a general span/range/segment of
things allocator.  Last time I did something similar, it was with a linear
implementation for some networking code.  Nice to see they've done better,
and combined it in interesting way with the slab allocator.

- Alex

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