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The kernel allocates memory too, hence an improvement at that level benefits allocations across the board.

So the use case described by Brouer was for networking code in the kernel? The article explicitly mentions his use case as the ‘original’ motivation, regardless of whether that’s the primary use case.

Is the kernel then the primary place this is used now? Which places in the kernel need and take advantage of it?

The Sun RPC code had a loop where it allocated one page at a time and filled an array with the returned pointers. The article says there was a 500% performance improvement after replacing the loop with a single call to the batch allocator. (While RPC can be thought of as networking code, it is more than just network packet flow.)

There are probably other places where this will help. Now that the interface is available, developers can start trying it.

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