Re: [PATCH -v4 0/2] Lockless memory allocator and list

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, 2010-11-16 at 08:38 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> I kind of like the lock-less list implementation (it could easily be
> useful for random things, and it's very simple).

Yes, there's various implementations floating around, and we already
have one in-kernel ( net/rds/xlist.h ), mason and axboe and me have been
kicking around various patches using that thing in other circumstances
as well.

[ At some point we had perf -- what now is kernel/irq_work.c --  using
  it as well, but the new code grew too complex due to requirements
  from Huang ]

>  And I don't think the
> notion of a lockless memory allocator is wrong either, although it
> looks a lot more specialized than the list thing (the solution to
> lockless allocations is generally simply to do them ahead of time).
> 
Right, I don't generally object to lockless things, but they either need
to be 1) faster than the existing code, and/or 2) have a very convincing
use-case (other than performance) for their added complexity.

Afaict the proposed patch adds lots more LOCK'ed instructions into that
allocator path than it removes, ie its a slow down for existing users.


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