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phkmalloc

¶ Jason Evans laid jemalloc to rest yesterday, and gave a kind shoutout to my malloc, aka. “phkmalloc”, and it occured to me, that I should write that story down.

Ten years previously, I had done sound for an amateur production of Show Boat in hometown (Slagelse, Denmark), and my first real girlfriend was one of the girls from the chorus, so I couldn’t help but sing “Old man river” to myself: No need to apologize: I did not even know the award existed, and it would never meant as much to me, as spending an hour over breakfast, chatting with Dennis Ritchie about device nodes and timekeeping in early UNIX kernels, and receiving his blessing for my DEVFS. But multi-threading and multi-CPU systems were rapidly becoming a thing, and the tightly knit data structures of phkmalloc left no other option than to slap one big mutex around all of it, which were OK one or two CPUs, but became a performance problem from 4 cores and upwards.

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