Quotes of the week

GPUs have gotten more and more complex every 6 months for about 8 years now. A current radeonhd 4000 series bears little resemblence to the radeon r100 that was out then. The newer GPUs require a full complier to be written for an instruction set more complex than x86 in some places. The newer GPUs get more and more varied modesetting combos that all require supporting.

Now I'd would guess (educated slightly) that the amount of code required to write a full driver stack for a modern GPU has probably gone up 40-50x what used to be required, whereas the number of open source community developers has probably doubled since 2001. Also newer GPU designs have forced us to redesign the Linux GPU architecture, this had to happen in parallel with all the other stuff, again with similiar number of developers. So yes it sucks but it should point out why there is no reason why 3D should really be working on all cards.

The best way to make everything "just work" is to eliminate it.

I agree that having only one of SLAB/SLUB/SLQB would be nice, but it's going to take a lot of heavy lifting in the form of hacking and benchmarking to have confidence that there's a clear performance winner. Given the multiple dimensions of performance (scalability/throughput/latency for starters), I don't even think there's good a priori reason to believe that a clear winner CAN exist. SLUB may always have better latency, and SLQB may always have better throughput. If you're NYSE, you might have different performance priorities than if you're Google or CERN or Sony that amount to millions of dollars. Repeatedly saying "but we should have only one allocator" isn't going to change that.