Pulling slabs out of struct page

It's certainly <i>an</i> article. Starting with lines like "The C programming language [33] is the first, and, so far,only widely successful programming language that provides operating system developers with a high-level language alternative to assembler (compare to [42])"? BLISS, PL/I and Algol 68 all were used as implementation languages for OSes released before Unix, and afterwards, any number of languages have been used, with "only widely successful" coming off as a weaselly way of saying "most widely successful".

It concludes with "A small performance improvement will generally not justify a decrease in code stability for operating systems...", but as I see it, that's not supported by reality; stuff like https://lwn.net/Articles/871726/ makes it clear Linux kernel programmers will write to conventions no C compiler ever has promised they won't break (multiprocessing largely postdates ISO C) for a speedup. My guess is that if kernel developers got a -kernel switch that gave them everything they claimed to want at the cost of an average of 15% loss in performance, they'd be up in arms.

In any case, all the article really says about "TBAA is unsuited to kernel development." is "it may be possible in ISO C to push all these different types into a union, but that would harm modularity,..." Given that C is about the only language in modern use not to have a module or package system (showing a lack of commitment to modularity) and we're talking about a direct hit to code stability, I'm not overwhelmed by that argument.