memory defragmentation

memory defragmentation

<i>Daniel's plans for memory defragmentation require some fancy footwork to relocate physical pages, like needing to know what kernel data structures are pointing to which pages. Once they've gone that far, how long until someone hacks the Linux kernel to support garbage collection??</i>

The kernel already has garbage collection, for example, dentries and cold cache pages. But that's probably not what you meant. If you mean, we should use algorithms that don't keep track explicitly of what references what, and clean up with a classic garbage collector, I'd argue against it. Explicit reference counting is generally a more efficient, predictable way to handle dynamic objects, and so is more suitable for kernel use. Sure, it may be more work to write and debug code that works that way, but that is just the way life is in kernel land.

Regards,

Daniel