[Devel] Re: [PATCH 0/4] Kernel memory accounting container (v3)

[Balbir Singh]

Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Sep 2007, Pavel Emelyanov wrote:
> 
>> As I have already told kmalloc caches cannot be accounted easily
>> so turning the accounting on for them will fail with -EINVAL.
>> Turning the accounting off is possible only if the cache has
>> no objects. This is done so because turning accounting off
>> implies unaccounting of all the objects in the cache, but due
>> to full-pages in slub are not stored in any lists (usually)
>> this is impossible to do so, however I'm open for discussion
>> of how to make this work.
> 
> Where can I find more information why is would not be possible to 
> account kmalloc caches?
> 

Hi, Christoph,

I've wondered the same thing and asked the question. Pavel wrote
back to me saying

"The pages that are full of objects are not linked in any list
in kmem_cache so we just cannot find them."

I suspect that SLUB changes this, but I need to look at the
allocator more carefully.

-- 
	Warm Regards,
	Balbir Singh
	Linux Technology Center
	IBM, ISTL