etofore unknown bugs in the kernel because corrupted objects may now be placed differently and corrupt differing neighboring objects. Enable sanity checks to find those. H. Diagnostics The current slab diagnostics are difficult to use and require a recompilation of the kernel. SLUB contains debugging code that is always available (but is kept out of the hot code paths). SLUB diagnostics can be enabled via the "slab_debug" option. Parameters can be specified to select a single or a group of slab caches for diagnostics. This means that the system is running with the usual performance and it is much more likely that race conditions can be reproduced. I. Resiliency If basic sanity checks are on then SLUB is capable of detecting common error conditions and recover as best as possible to allow the system to continue. J. Tracing Tracing can be enabled via the slab_debug=T, option during boot. SLUB will then protocol all actions on that slabcache and dump the object contents on free. K. On demand DMA cache creation. Generally DMA caches are not needed. If a kmalloc is used with __GFP_DMA then just create this single slabcache that is needed. For systems that have no ZONE_DMA requirement the support is completely eliminated. L. Performance increase Some benchmarks have shown speed improvements on kernbench in the range of 5-10%. The locking overhead of slub is based on the underlying base allocation size. If we can reliably allocate larger order pages then it is possible to increase slub performance much further. The anti-fragmentation patches may enable further performance increases. Tested on: i386 UP + SMP, x86_64 UP + SMP + NUMA emulation, IA64 NUMA + Simulator SLUB Boot options slub_nomerge Disable merging of slabs slub_min_order=x Require a minimum order for slab caches. This increases the managed chunk size and therefore reduces meta data and locking overhead. slub_min_objects=x Mininum objects per slab. Default is 8. slub_max_order=x Avoid generating slabs larger than order specified. slub_debug Enable all diagnostics for all caches slub_debug= Enable selective options for all caches slub_debug=, Enable selective options for a certain set of caches Available Debug options F Double Free checking, sanity and resiliency R Red zoning P Object / padding poisoning U Track last free / alloc T Trace all allocs / frees (only use for individual slabs). To use SLUB: Apply this patch and then select SLUB as the default slab allocator. [hugh@veritas.com: fix an oops-causing locking error] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: various stupid cleanups and small fixes] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds ç9a‹ž-x