Implementing alignment guarantees for kmalloc()

Posted Oct 20, 2019 23:36 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Implementing alignment guarantees for kmalloc() by epa
Parent article: Implementing alignment guarantees for kmalloc()

> I think the question is more whether there are any callers that have a specific requirement for unaligned allocations, that is, cases where there are so many tiny allocations that the wasted space matters.
Typically such unspoken ABIs are extended explicitly, by adding new flags.

So by default kmalloc() should return an aligned block, but there should be a flag explicitly requesting unaligned block. This way there won't be a need to have multiple allocators in each subsystem needing this.