Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974380/

Optimizing the kernel’s memory use is made much easier if developers have
an accurate idea of how memory is being used, but the kernel’s
instrumentation is not as good as it could be. When Suren Baghdasaryan and
Kent Overstreet presented their
memory-allocation profiling work, which is meant to address this
shortcoming, at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and
BPF Summit, their objective was uncontroversial but the proposed solution
ran into opposition that played out at length on the mailing lists (example)
over the last year. So it may be a bit surprising that, when the two
returned to the memory-management track in the 2024 gathering, the
controversy was gone and the discussion focused on improving details of the
implementation.