Slub already has two ways of allocating an object. One is via its own
logic and the other is via the call to kmalloc_large to hand off object
allocation to the page allocator. kmalloc_large is typically used
for objects >= PAGE_SIZE.
We can use that handoff to avoid failing if a higher order kmalloc slab
allocation cannot be satisfied by the page allocator. If we reach the
out of memory path then simply try a kmalloc_large(). kfree() can
already handle the case of an object that was allocated via the page
allocator and so this will work just fine (apart from object
accounting...).
For any kmalloc slab that already requires higher order allocs (which
makes it impossible to use the page allocator fastpath!)
we just use PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER to get the largest number of
objects in one go from the page allocator slowpath.
On a 4k platform this patch will lead to the following use of higher
order pages for the following kmalloc slabs:
8 ... 1024 order 0
2048 .. 4096 order 3 (4k slab only after the next patch)
We may waste some space if fallback occurs on a 2k slab but we
are always able to fallback to an order 0 alloc.
Reviewed-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>