[nycbug-talk] Slab Allocator

[Yarema]

A while ago I read on Matt Dillon's DragonFly diary
http://www.DragonFlyBSD.org/status/diary.shtml
that

# DragonFly now has slab allocator for the kernel! The allocator is
about 1/3 the size of FreeBSD-5's slab allocator and features per-cpu
isolation, mutexless operation, cache sensitivity (locality of
reference), and optimized zeroing code.
# The core of the slab allocator is MP safe but at the moment we still
use the malloc_type structure for statistics reporting which is not yet
MP safe, and the backing store (KVM routines) are not MP safe. Even, so
making the whole thing MP safe is not expected to be difficult.

1/3 the size of FreeBSD-5's slab allocator?!  that's awesome!  DragonFly
rulez!  er, WTF is a Slab Allocator?

it's still over my head, but here's where it all started:
http://Blogs.Sun.com/bonwick/en_US/category/Slab+Allocator
... by the creator of ZFS no less.  Good story.

-- 
Yarema