• March 21

  [$] The guaranteed contiguous memory allocator

  

  lwn.net

  As a system runs and its memory becomes fragmented, allocating large, physically contiguous regions of memory...

  As a system runs and its memory becomes fragmented, allocating large, physically contiguous regions of memory becomes increasingly difficult. Much effort over the years has gone into avoiding the need to make such allocations whenever possible, but there are times when they simply cannot be avoided. The kernel's contiguous memory allocator (CMA) subsystem attempts to make such allocations possible, but it has never been...

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More like this (3)

• May 1

  [$] Custom out-of-memory killers in BPF

  

  lwn.net

  The out-of-memory (OOM) killer has long been a scary and controversial part of the Linux kernel....

  The out-of-memory (OOM) killer has long been a scary and controversial part of the Linux kernel. It is summoned from some dark place when the system as a whole (or, more recently, any given control group) is running so low on memory that further allocations are not possible; its job is to kill off processes until a sufficient amount of memory has been freed....

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• April 16

  [$] Improvements for the contiguous memory allocator

  

  lwn.net

  As a system runs, its memory becomes fragmented; it does not take long before the allocation...

  As a system runs, its memory becomes fragmented; it does not take long before the allocation of large, physically contiguous memory ranges becomes difficult or impossible. The contiguous memory allocator (CMA) is a kernel subsystem that attempts to address this problem, but it has never worked as well as some would like. Two sessions in the memory-management track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,...

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• April 15

  [$] Automatic tuning for weighted interleaving

  

  lwn.net

  It is common, on NUMA systems, to try to allocate all memory on the local node,...

  It is common, on NUMA systems, to try to allocate all memory on the local node, since it will be the fastest. That is not the only possible policy, though; another is weighted interleaving, which seeks to distribute allocations across memory controllers to maximize the bandwidth utilization on each. Configuring such policies can be challenging, though. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and...

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