Memory allocators may disable interrupts or preemption as part of the
allocation and freeing process. For PREEMPT_RT it is important that
these sections remain deterministic and short and therefore don't depend
on the size of the memory to allocate/ free or the inner state of the
algorithm.
Until v3.12-RT the SLAB allocator was an option but involved several
changes to meet all the requirements. The SLUB design fits better with
PREEMPT_RT model and so the SLAB patches were dropped in the 3.12-RT
patchset. Comparing the two allocator, SLUB outperformed SLAB in both
throughput (time needed to allocate and free memory) and the maximal
latency of the system measured with cyclictest during hackbench.
SLOB was never evaluated since it was unlikely that it preforms better
than SLAB. During a quick test, the kernel crashed with SLOB enabled
during boot.
Disable SLAB and SLOB on PREEMPT_RT.
[bigeasy@linutronix.de: commit description]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20211015210336.gen3tib33ig5q2md@linutronix.de
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
252220dab9