Linux's Slab Allocator Is Officially Deprecated | Hacker News Reader

Linux's Slab Allocator Is Officially Deprecated

phoronix.com

98 pointsmfiguiere22 comments

SLAB vs SLOB vs SLUB: https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...

Fortunately SLIB and SLEB are still in our future. I hope they don't need to resort to SLYB, much less SLOEB and the like.

> SLOEB

Excuse me, I think you mean “SLÖB”!

Isn't the kernel USASCII-only (POSIX charset)?

OSLOEB

You can't use that one in VMs though. Only on bare metal.

Huh, thanks to the article, I learned that SLOB's maintainer was Mercurial's creator, Olivia Mackall. I'm in awe of these people who are involved in more than one gigantic project in their lifetime.

Mercurial was created for the same reason git was created, around the same time. So yeah, Olivia Mackall was a kernel hacker at the time.

Formerly Matt Mackall, if anyone, like me, was confused by the name change.

Maybe you should check Fabrice Bellard then. https://bellard.org/

His best known works include FFMPEG and QEMU, there are many others.

SLUB is a nice story of a simpler implementation winning out, even when SLAB may have been more technically sophisticated.

LWN coverage of the LSFMM session that led to this decision: https://lwn.net/Articles/932201/

How does something ends up on the front page which is so uninteresting(1) that both on the site it comes from and here, there isn't a single comment.

(1): Uninteresting but not irrelevant. Like a step in a stair, each step is uninteresting but relevant as missing a step is a huge issue.

Most links here have dozens of points, this (and a couple of others) only has seven. Perhaps a “hot” metric saw a few votes come in quickly and overestimated its general interest. It should fall off the front page very quickly.

How an OS allocates memory is pretty important

Like I sayed important but uninteresting.

Because this is not about changing how Linux allocates memory.

It's about deprecating a method Linux used in the past but has by default switched away from already in the past.

Clearly people disagree that it's uninteresting.

You don't need to personally like every story posted on HN. It's fine to skip the some of them. You can even hide them.

it's not weather its interesting for me or you but weather its interesting enough for HN readers to interact with it in the comment section ...

and I was wondering how something which seemed to be not leading to much engagement at all ended up on the front page, I wasn't complaining or saying it's bad, just wondering

> Like I sayed important but uninteresting

Uninteresting to you. Interesting to me.

This detail of an in kernel allocator isn't very important or novel, but Linux changes are easy to report on since they're done in public, so they get articles.

you realize that you can just ignore links you don't find interesting instead of complaining, right? that's what everyone else does. HN is not your own personal link curator

Agreed. I wish the article dove into how SLAB works, why it is being deprecated, and what it's modern equivalent/replacement is. That would've been worth reading.

I clicked a few of the links in the article and the links in those articles and didn't find any of that.

This is just an announcement for those in the know.

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