RFC: getting rid of Xalloc/Xfree/... in server

[Matthieu Herrb]

On Thu, May 06, 2010 at 12:50:25AM +0200, Rémi Cardona wrote:
> Le 05/05/2010 21:27, Mikhail Gusarov a écrit :
> > Hi,
> > 
> > There is RFC patchset which gets rid of Xalloc/Xfree/... wrappers in X
> > server while retaining the API and ABI.
> 
> Does anyone know if the server could benefit from a memory allocator
> like glib has? Does the server fragment memory a lot?
> 

In the XFree86 times it used to have its own allocator for 
various reasons (the main motivation was to be able to give back free'd 
memory to the system, but also to speed up small allocations).

Since then, it has been commonly admitted that writing malloc() 
implementation was not the goal of X people, so this was removed, letting
the OS people optimize malloc() and relying on them to fix any issue
X could reveal.

If someone wants to be able to experiment with different malloc
implementations in X, then we should keep wrappers to make it easier.

-- 
Matthieu Herrb