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Re: Speaking on malloc internals at FOSS.in


On 11/26/2012 12:47 PM, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Siddhesh Poyarekar
> <siddhesh@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm doing a talk on malloc internals at a conference in Bangalore
>> called FOSS.in[1].  I have a slide on future plans or concerns, which
>> include the following right now:
>>
>> * A second look at dynamic thresholds since they worsen fragmentation
>>   for some cases
>> * A look at measuring resource usage in the light of multiple arenas
>> * Smarter controls on arena creation, like looking at RLIMIT_AS while
>>   deciding number of arenas.
>>
>> The above are tentative ideas based on my experience, which is not
>> even close to being as extensive as most people on this list.  Hence,
>> I'd really appreciate feedback on this and also any additional ideas
>> that anyone may have.  I'll obviously give credit for the ideas on my
>> slides.
> * Accepted concensus on opensource benchmarks to use for validating
> allocator changes.
> * Stable API that allows interaction with allocator running in an application.
>   - Usable by a debugger, audit library etc.
> * Application hook to control arena creation.
>   - Can use allocator API and application specific information to make
> decisions.
> * Systemtap probes
>   - What do we measure? What additional probes do we need?

* Hooks to allow arenas to be created using huge pages (either default size
or particular sizes)
* Hook to allow application to do "something" to mmap'ed memory when it's
fresh from the system - e.g. mbind(), or e.g. for the tile architecture we
have some cachebinding magic we can optionally do for performance on
newly-mmap'ed regions
* Controlled way to force allocation of memory up front like
mmap(MAP_POPULATE) so that if requested, errors are always detected as NULL
returns from malloc() rather than potentially as fatal signals delivered by
the kernel on out-of-memory
* Hook to request MAP_SHARED for allocated anonymous memory so forked
processes can share an arena (with inter-process mutex locking, like it
currently does for pthreads)

-- 
Chris Metcalf, Tilera Corp.
http://www.tilera.com


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