X Server: abused or buggy?

[Matthieu Herrb]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> 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.)
> 

XFree86 used to have one for this purpose. It was one of the 1st victims
of the "X is not an operating system" cleanup.

-- 
Matthieu Herrb