On Sat, August 12, 2006 16:14, Peter Zijlstra said:

Hi,

here the latest effort, it includes a whole new trivial allocator with a
horrid name and an almost full rewrite of the deadlock prevention core.
This version does not do anything per device and hence does not depend
on the new netdev_alloc_skb() API.

The reason to add a second allocator to the receive side is twofold:
1) it allows easy detection of the memory pressure / OOM situation;
2) it allows the receive path to be unbounded and go at full speed when
   resources permit.

The choice of using the global memalloc reserve as a mempool makes that
the new allocator has to release pages as soon as possible; if we were
to hoard pages in the allocator the memalloc reserve would not get
replenished readily.

Version 2 had about 250 new lines of code, while v3 has close to 600, when
including the SROG code. And that while things should have become simpler.
So why use SROG instead of the old alloc_pages() based code? And why couldn't
you use a slightly modified SLOB instead of writing a new allocator?
It looks like overkill to me.

Greetings,

Indan