Upcoming week's work for Matt

Matthew Dillon dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Sun Aug 24 13:37:38 PDT 2003


    This coming week I am going to focus on two subsystems:

    (1) Slab allocator.  I am going to bring in the slab allocator that I
	developed for another open source project that is particularly suited
	to our MP design.  I intend to get it working and to replace some
	of the more common non-critical kernel malloc/free sequences
	with calls to the slab allocator as a starter.  The intent will be
	to eventually replace malloc/free with something that is MP safe.

	I'm hoping that once I get it proved out and working that other people
	will be able to start submitted malloc replacement patch sets using
	the new allocator.

    (2) VFS path cache.  I am going to start reworking the VFS path cache
	code and VFS_LOOKUP / VOP_LOOKUP, a necessary precursor to VFS
	messaging but for this paticular work I am going to focus on removing
	the vnode locks being used for directory traversals and replace them
	with path cache locks (i.e. move them outside individual VFSs).

	This may take more then a week to accomplish, the VFS lookup code is
	the most complex part of VFS.


							-Matt






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