ima: use of radix tree cache indexing == massive waste of memory?

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Mon Oct 18 18:13:16 UTC 2010


On 10/18/2010 11:11 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/18/2010 09:48 AM, Eric Paris wrote:
>>
>>> 1) IMA uses radix trees which end up wasting 500 bytes per inode because the key 
>>> is too sparse.  I've got a patch which uses an rbtree instead I'm testing and 
>>> will send along shortly.  I found it funny working on the patch to see that 
>>> Documentation/rbtree.txt says "This differs from radix trees (which are used to 
>>> efficiently store sparse arrays and thus use long integer indexes to 
>>> insert/access/delete nodes)" Which flys in the face of this report.
>>
>> Radix trees can efficiently store data associated with sparse keys *as long as the 
>> keys are clustered*.  For random key distributions, they perform horribly.
> 
> For random key distributions hash and rbtree data structures are pretty good 
> choices.
> 
> But the (much) more fundamental question is to turn the non-trivial allocation 
> overhead of this opt-in feature into truly opt-in overhead.
> 

Yes, and not just the allocation overhead, but apparently locking
overhead, too.

	-hpa


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