Allocators

• TLSF - The Two-Level Segregate Fit allocator from the Industrial Informatics and Real-Time Systems Group
  • Paper list - Check out 2008's "A constant-time dynamic storage allocator for real-time systems"

Slab

• Jeff Bonwick's classic 1994 creation, first published in the context of the SunOS 5.4 kernel

Linux kernel variants

The following data is collected from kernel 2.6.30:

• SLAB: The original. From the Kconfig help:

The regular slab allocator that is established and known to work
well in all environments. It organizes cache hot objects in
per cpu and per node queues.

• SLUB (Christoph Lameter, 2007) reduced the size of the slab object queue and improved scalability for many processors (LKML). From the Kconfig help:

SLUB is a slab allocator that minimizes cache line usage
instead of managing queues of cached objects (SLAB approach).
Per cpu caching is realized using slabs of objects instead
of queues of objects. SLUB can use memory efficiently
and has enhanced diagnostics. SLUB is the default choice for
a slab allocator.

• SLQB (Nick Piggin, 2008)
• SLOB (LKML)
• Differences between SL*Bs