Hello!
First, thanks for your patches and efforts spent on these cleanups.
On Sep 19, 2014, at 12:45 AM, Julia Lawall wrote:
> With respect to the upper case lower case issue, does the thing need to be
> a macro? I think that the lowercase is more or less fine, but only if
> what is behind it is a function.
I don't have a strong opinion either way as long as we have all the functionality
we need.
> I say more or less fine, because normally in the kernel the special
> allocators have special purposes, eg allocating and initializing the xyz
> structure. Here what is wanted is a general purpose allocator with lots
> of special tracing features, so it is not quite the same thing. And one
> can wonder why all of these special tracing features are not relevant to
> the kernel as a whole?
Like I explained in my previous email, many of the tracing features are already
possible to replace with other existing in-kernel mechanisms like kmemleak.
Except the total tally of allocations/frees so that a memleak could be visibly
easily seen on module unload time. I think this would be useful for other
kinds of modules too, not just lustre, so having that as a generic allocator
feature would be cool too.
> In reading through the description of the needed features, it seems like
> only the _ptr extension requires being a macro. Do we need that? The
We only need that as a less error-prone way of having
x = obd_kzalloc(sizeof(*x), ….)
…
obd_free(…, sizeof(*x))
Real free function does not take size argument, but we need that for
total allocated/freed accounting. Easy to have disconnect with
the size argument of obd_free to be wrong.
> rest of the kernel manages to do x = kzalloc(sizeof(*x),...) ok. It's
> unpleasant to have an assignment hidden in this way. And currently it is
> not used consistently. There are some OBD_ALLOCs that have the same form.
Yes, those are converted as thy are noticed.
> Sorry for overlooking the frees. I was focusing on trying one thing at a
> time...
I kind of think it's a related issue.
Touching ones needs to touch the other if not in the same patch then in
a next patch. And that's why I think consideations for what FREEs would need
is needed from the start, so the FREEs removal patch does not goes and patches a bunch of just patched allocs.
Thanks.
Bye,
Oleg
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