This gets rid of all kmalloc caches larger than page size. A kmalloc
request larger than PAGE_SIZE > 2 is going to be passed through to the page
allocator. This works both inline where we will call __get_free_pages
instead of kmem_cache_alloc and in __kmalloc.
kfree is modified to check if the object is in a slab page. If not then
the page is freed via the page allocator instead. Roughly similar to what
SLOB does.
Advantages:
- Reduces memory overhead for kmalloc array
- Large kmalloc operations are faster since they do not
need to pass through the slab allocator to get to the
page allocator.
- Performance increase of 10%-20% on alloc and 50% on free for
PAGE_SIZEd allocations.
SLUB must call page allocator for each alloc anyways since
the higher order pages which that allowed avoiding the page alloc calls
are not available in a reliable way anymore. So we are basically removing
useless slab allocator overhead.
- Large kmallocs yields page aligned object which is what
SLAB did. Bad things like using page sized kmalloc allocations to
stand in for page allocate allocs can be transparently handled and are not
distinguishable from page allocator uses.
- Checking for too large objects can be removed since
it is done by the page allocator.
Drawbacks:
- No accounting for large kmalloc slab allocations anymore
- No debugging of large kmalloc slab allocations.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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