Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974138/

There are two fundamental levels of memory allocator in the Linux kernel:
the page allocator, which allocates memory in units of pages, and the slab
allocator, which allocates arbitrarily-sized chunks that are usually (but
not necessarily) smaller than a page. The slab allocator is the one that
stands behind commonly used kernel functions like kmalloc(). At
the 2024 Linux
Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, slab maintainer
Vlastimil Babka provided an update on recent changes at the slab level and
discussed the changes that are yet to come.