SLUB: Conform more to SLAB's SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN behavior Currently SLUB is using a strict L1_CACHE_BYTES alignment if SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN is specified. SLAB does not align to a cacheline if the object is smaller than half of a cacheline. Small objects are then aligned by SLAB to a fraction of a cacheline. Make SLUB just forget about the alignment requirement if the object size is less than L1_CACHE_BYTES. It seems that fractional alignments are no good because they grow the object and reduce the object density in a cache line needlessly causing additional cache line fetches. If we are already throwing the user suggestion of a cache line alignment away then lets do the best we can. Maybe SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN also needs to be tossed given its wishy-washy handling but doing so would require an audit of all kmem_cache_allocs throughout the kernel source. In any case one needs to explictly specify an alignment during kmem_cache_create to either slab allocator in order to ensure that the objects are cacheline aligned. [Patch has a nice memory compaction effect on 32 bit platforms] Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter Index: linux-2.6.21-rc7-mm2/mm/slub.c =================================================================== --- linux-2.6.21-rc7-mm2.orig/mm/slub.c 2007-04-26 11:41:15.000000000 -0700 +++ linux-2.6.21-rc7-mm2/mm/slub.c 2007-04-26 11:41:43.000000000 -0700 @@ -1483,9 +1483,19 @@ static int calculate_order(int size) * various ways of specifying it. */ static unsigned long calculate_alignment(unsigned long flags, - unsigned long align) + unsigned long align, unsigned long size) { - if (flags & SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN) + /* + * If the user wants hardware cache aligned objects then + * follow that suggestion if the object is sufficiently + * large. + * + * The hardware cache alignment cannot override the + * specified alignment though. If that is greater + * then use it. + */ + if ((flags & SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN) && + size > L1_CACHE_BYTES / 2) return max_t(unsigned long, align, L1_CACHE_BYTES); if (align < ARCH_SLAB_MINALIGN) @@ -1674,7 +1684,7 @@ static int calculate_sizes(struct kmem_c * user specified (this is unecessarily complex due to the attempt * to be compatible with SLAB. Should be cleaned up some day). */ - align = calculate_alignment(flags, align); + align = calculate_alignment(flags, align, s->objsize); /* * SLUB stores one object immediately after another beginning from @@ -2251,7 +2261,7 @@ static struct kmem_cache *find_mergeable return NULL; size = ALIGN(size, sizeof(void *)); - align = calculate_alignment(flags, align); + align = calculate_alignment(flags, align, size); size = ALIGN(size, align); list_for_each(h, &slab_caches) {