On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:03:08AM -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>> "FW" == Florian Weimer
<fweimer(a)redhat.com> writes:
FW> I would like to request a change of the Packaging Guidelines,
FW> advising packagers not to interpose malloc.
How strong of a restriction are you looking for? This sort of feels
like something which would at the strongest be a "SHOULD NOT" but maybe
you're looking for an absolute ban.
Some maintainers may find it difficult to comply with an absolute ban if
the relevant software doesn't make it easy to change the allocator. And
some upstreams may have strong preferences for one allocator over
another (which I imagine would often be linked to performance). Will
assistance be offered to modify affected packages? What about
contacting upstreams?
Yeah it is often linked to a supposed performance improvement. QEMU supports
choice of native, jemalloc or tcmalloc and in Fedora we used to use
tcmalloc for QEMU for a while. Then we checked performance again and found
that the delta to glibc's native malloc had essentially gone, so we've
stopped using tcmalloc. IOW, even if it was done for performance reasons
originally, we should not assume that is still valid today as glibc has
improved its impl.
Regards,
Daniel
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