SLUB Updates Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.10 Merge Window

If all goes well the Linux 6.9 stable kernel will be released on Sunday and in turn mark the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window. In hoping for an on-time release, some Linux kernel subsystem maintainers have been already submitting early pull requests of their feature material for v6.10. Among those early pulls are the SLAB (SLUB) updates.

The SLUB allocator code in Linux 6.10 has a previously reported on change to reduce memory consumption in extreme scenarios. This change to prevent allocating many slabs when a NUMA node is full is all ready to go for Linux 6.10.

Back during the Linux 6.9 cycle the SLAB allocator was removed after previously being deprecated. In turn SLUB is the preferred allocator moving forward for all users. With Linux 6.10 there is some additional cleaning work with the actual SLAB allocator now being gone.

Also notable with this new material for Linux 6.10 is a fix to prevent stalls when reading from /proc/slabinfo. For workloads that have alloc/free patterns with many partially used slabs, reading from /proc/slabinfo could cause some undesired stalls that are now addressed for Linux 6.10.

The pull request also has several fixes and other improvements to the SLUB memory management code.