The kernel's genpool subsystem

The kernel is a huge program; among other things, that means that many problems encountered by a kernel developer have already been solved somewhere else in the tree. But those solutions are not always well known or documented. Recently, a seasoned developer confessed to having never encountered the "genpool" memory allocator. This little subsystem does not appear in the kernel documentation, and is likely to be unknown to others as well. In the interest of fixing both of those problems, here is an overview of genpool (or "genalloc") and what it does.

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