Slab merge is good feature to reduce fragmentation. If new creating slab
have similar size and property with exsitent slab, this feature reuse it
rather than creating new one. As a result, objects are packed into fewer
slabs so that fragmentation is reduced.
Below is result of my testing.
* After boot, sleep 20; cat /proc/meminfo | grep Slab
<Before>
Slab: 25136 kB
<After>
Slab: 24364 kB
We can save 3% memory used by slab.
For supporting this feature in SLAB, we need to implement SLAB specific
kmem_cache_flag() and __kmem_cache_alias(), because SLUB implements some
SLUB specific processing related to debug flag and object size change on
these functions.
Signed-off-by: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com> Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>