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Mengfan Ma
Mengfan Ma

Reputation: 351

Why does the Linux kernel require small short-term memory chunks in odd sizes？

I'm reading Operating System: Internals and Design Principles by William Stallings, 7th edition. In section 8.4 Linux Memory Management, when talking about kernel memory management, it goes like:

The foundation of kernel memory allocation for Linux is the page allocation mechanism used for user virtual memory management. As in the virtual memory scheme, a buddy algorithm is used so that memory for the kernel can be allocated and deallocated in units of one or more pages. Because the minimum amount of memory that can be allocated in this fashion is one page, the page allocator alone would be inefficient because the kernel requires small short-term memory chunks in odd sizes.

I could understand the discuss on paging, but why does the author says that the kernel requires small short-term memory chunks in odd sizes., especially, why in odd sizes?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 252

Answers (1)

ShadowRanger
ShadowRanger

Reputation: 155403

Because most programs require small allocations, for relatively short periods, in a variety of sizes? That's why malloc and friends exist: To subdivide the larger allocations from the OS into smaller pieces with sub-page-size granularity. Want a linked list (commonly needed in OS kernels)? You need to be able to allocate small nodes that contain the value and a pointer to the next node (and possibly a reverse pointer too).

I suspect by "odd sizes" they just mean "arbitrary sizes"; I don't expect the kernel to be unusually heavy on 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. byte allocations, but the allocation sizes are, in many cases, not likely to be consistent enough that a fixed block allocator is broadly applicable. Writing a special block allocator for each possible linked list node size (let alone every other possible size needed for dynamically allocated memory) isn't worth it unless that linked list is absolutely performance critical after all.

Upvotes: 3

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