V4->V5 - Rediff against current upstream + Pekka's cleanup branch. V3->V4: - Do not use the COMMON macro anymore. - Fixup various issues - No general sysfs support yet due to lockdep issues with keys in kmalloc'ed memory. V2->V3: - Incorporate more feedback from Joonsoo Kim and Glauber Costa - And a couple more patches to deal with slab duping and move more code to slab_common.c V1->V2: - Incorporate glommers feedback. - Add 2 more patches dealing with common code in kmem_cache_destroy This is a series of patches that extracts common functionality from slab allocators into a common code base. The intend is to standardize as much as possible of the allocator behavior while keeping the distinctive features of each allocator which are mostly due to their storage format and serialization approaches. This patchset makes a beginning by extracting common functionality in kmem_cache_create() and kmem_cache_destroy(). However, there are numerous other areas where such work could be beneficial: 1. Extract the sysfs support from SLUB and make it common. That way all allocators have a common sysfs API and are handleable in the same way regardless of the allocator chose. 2. Extract the error reporting and checking from SLUB and make it available for all allocators. This means that all allocators will gain the resiliency and error handling capabilties. 3. Extract the memory hotplug and cpu hotplug handling. It seems that SLAB may be more sophisticated here. Having common code here will make it easier to maintain the special code. 4. Extract the aliasing capability of SLUB. This will enable fast slab creation without creating too many additional slab caches. The arrays of caches of varying sizes in numerous subsystems do not cause the creation of numerous slab caches. Storage density is increased and the cache footprint is reduced. Ultimately it is to be hoped that the special code for each allocator shrinks to a mininum. This will also make it easier to make modification to allocators. In the far future one could envision that the current allocators will just become storage algorithms that can be chosen based on the need of the subsystem. F.e. Cpu cache dependend performance = Bonwick allocator (SLAB) Minimal cycle count and cache footprint = SLUB Maximum storage density = K&R allocator (SLOB) -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>