It used to use slabs, and memory usage was _horrible_.
> Linus, do you have any objections against it? If it's OK for you
> I'll roll a patch and submit it.
We had it already for a short moment in the 2.1.x series, and it simply
didn't work very well. It had all the slab problems with multi-page
allocations, and inodes also have very hard-to-predict allocation
lifetimes, so what happened was that when you allocated a lot of inodes,
the pages were almost never freed back to the page pool, because there was
often a few inodes holding things locked down anyway.
It's a long time ago, but I essentially reverted it within a few releases
because _I_ had problems with it (and that's on machines with plenty of
memory).
> Another question: we still have a race in rename() on UNIX
> filsystems (d_invalidate() stuff).
Remind me..
Linus
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