On Fri, 4 Sep 2015, Alexander Duyck wrote: > Right, but one of the reasons for Jesper to implement the bulk alloc/free is > to avoid the cmpxchg that is being used to get stuff into or off of the per > cpu lists. There is no full cmpxchg used for the per cpu lists. Its a cmpxchg without lock semantics which is very cheap. > In the case of network drivers they are running in softirq context almost > exclusively. As such it is useful to have a set of buffers that can be > acquired or freed from this context without the need to use any > synchronization primitives. Then once the softirq context ends then we can > free up some or all of the resources back to the slab allocator. That is the case in the slab allocators. -- 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>