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An experimental comparison analysis of kernel-level memory allocators

Published: 13 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Memory management is one of the most important tasks of an operating system, since it has significant impact on the whole computing systems performance. The kernel memory allocator is the main OS subsystem responsible for this task, which has to deal with problems intrinsic to dynamic memory allocations, such as memory fragmentation and allocation overhead. In this paper, we present an experimental comparison analysis of four real implementations of kernel memory allocators: SLAB, SLOB, SLUB, and SLQB. This study considered the execution time, memory consumption, and memory fragmentation degree of all allocators under the same workload. Based on the findings obtained experimentally, in most of the cases, the memory allocator with best general performance was the SLOB, followed by SLAB, SLUB, and SLQB.

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Corbet, J. SLQB - and then there were four. 2008. http://lwn.net/Articles/311502/
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Corbet, J. The SLUB allocator. 2007. http://lwn.net/Articles/229984/
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cover image ACM Conferences
SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
April 2015
2418 pages
ISBN:9781450331968
DOI:10.1145/2695664
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 April 2015

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Author Tags

  1. kernel level
  2. memory allocator
  3. multicore

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  • Research-article

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SAC 2015
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SAC 2015: Symposium on Applied Computing
April 13 - 17, 2015
Salamanca, Spain

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SAC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 291 of 1,211 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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