X Server: abused or buggy?

Alan Coopersmith Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM
Wed Dec 10 08:32:31 PST 2008


Charles Lindsey wrote:
> However, let us not dismiss this POV too soon. It is usually argued that  
> an application that suffers from such memory fragmentation should be  
> restarted occasionally (and, given that the Xserver runs in user space,  
> unlike in Windoze, this is not impossible, though perhaps inconvenient in  
> some circumstances).

We could also investigate using a "slab allocator" approach for things like
data structures that are a fixed size, to keep them from ending up between
pixmaps, and hopefully reducing fragmentation that way, but that's also more
work no one has signed up for.   (I know on Solaris there's a slab allocator
version of malloc available in libumem, I don't know about libraries for other
platforms though, or if Xorg would have to write it's own.)

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering




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