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Linux Slab Allocator

Description

The slides of my talk about the Linux Slab Allocator at the University of Karlsruhe, WT 2004/2005, 2004-11-30.
The slides were modified according to the critics and questions after the talk. Please also have a look at the notes inside the slides, they sometimes contain additional informations and comments.
For all those "non-geeks" out there: The Slab Allocator ist the way Linux (and other operating systems) use internally to work with their memory.
More precisely: Kernel memory, the memory that the system itself uses, not the memory for the applications. And that's already one of the disadvantages of the current implementation of Linux...

The slides are in German.

[sxi] OpenOffice.org (Source-format); 434,5KB
[ppt] MS-Powerpoint (exported); 524,5KB
[pdf] Adobe Portable Document Format (exported); 279,3KB

For further reading I recommend the Wikipedia article about the Slab allocator (German), written by me.

Notes

What I realized during this talk:
  • Due to the excitement you forget to show your audience the keywords on multi keyword slides where you have to press a button to make them appear. So this feature is intended for more experienced (and less excited) speakers, or for a smaller audience.
  • I used a top-down way to explain the Slab Allocator in my slides, similar to Wolfgang Mauerer in his book "Linux Kernelarchitektur". Well, maybe a bottom-up style would be better, start with the objects and work yourself up to the caches, and not the other way round. Just my 2¢... ;-)
  • Well, you could talk an whole hour about the Slab Allocator, not only half an hour. :-)