Finally, since cloning the Linux kernel gave me some ideas, I would like to give you a couple of suggestions of my own. Feel free to do what you want with them.
First, I'm not sure whether this has been done or not, but I would like to suggest you to mark your kernel memory allocator with gcc's malloc attribute (and mark kfree() as taking void*, not const void*). Yes, I know, it apparently doesn't corresponds with what the malloc attribute's specification covers, since there are still pointers to the returned memory area somewhere else in the kernel. However, I would like to point out that this isn't relevant : in *any* malloc-like implementation, there will be such pointers somewhere in the allocator. What's important is whether they are such pointers *in the specific compilation units from which the allocator is called*. And since the allocator can't call itself (well, I'm not sure for the Linux one, of course, but this happens to be true in mine), leaving kmalloc in a separate file allows setting this attribute, which gives a little speed boost to the code (that's what it did to my kernel when I did it). That's because it allows the compiler to know that two areas allocated with such a function *cannot* alias each other, which helps it optimize the memory accesses to them. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
