Ryan Zezeski's Memory by the Slab: The Tale of Bonwick's Slab Allocator

Ryan Zezeski explains the design, history, and mechanics of Jeff Bonwick's slab allocator used in modern operating system kernels.

Meetup: bit.ly/1PaYkPc Paper: bit.ly/1VOACYe Slides: bit.ly/1WXP0jj Audio: bit.ly/1jzYwKy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sponsored by Two Sigma (@twosigma) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Description ------------------ In 1994 Jeff Bonwick presented his Slab Allocator at the USENIX SummerTechnical Conference. Over two decades later Google reports 35-thousand results for "slab allocator". CiteSeerX reports 93 citations. And many modern kernel allocators are based on his design, such as illumos, Linux, and FreeBSD. Jeff's design, along with the original paper, remains just as relevant today as it was 21 years ago. Join me as I tell the tale of the Slab Allocator: where it came from, what it is, why it's important, and where it's going. Bio ----- Ryan Zezeski (@rzezeski) is an aspiring kernel hacker working at Lucera Financial Infrastructures. A primary contributor to the Riak distributed database. Author of the try-try-try Riak Core tutorials. And creator of project Yokozuna: a program which combined the powers of Riak and Solr. He once wrote a blog post on POSIX Real Time Signals that made a bunch of people mad and caused a bug to be filed against Oracle Solaris. Ryan loves reading about arcane operating system stuff and occasionally writes about it at zinascii.com. His spirit animal is W. Richard Stevens.