SLOB Removal Submitted Ahead Of The Linux 6.4 Kernel Cycle

With the Linux 6.3 kernel likely being released as stable on Sunday, pull requests have already begun to be submitted of feature code for the Linux 6.4 merge window.

Vlastimil Babka of SUSE submitted the SLAB allocator updates today for Linux 6.4 and most noteworthy with that is the removal of the SLOB allocator.

Linux 6.2 deprecated the SLOB allocator with kernel developers recommend SLUB memory allocator being used instead. Removing SLOB lowers the maintenance burden of the allocators and can make API improvements easier to roll-out. The SLOB allocator in the past had been popular with embedded systems with miniscule amounts of RAM.

With no one the past few months complaining over its deprecation, kernel developers are ready to drop SLOB. Today's pull request indeed guts out the just under one thousand lines of code that makes up the SLOB allocator.

So with this pull request, bye-bye SLOB!