Re: Aligned blocks management: obsolete?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:47:08 +0400
> From: Dmitry Antipov <dmantipov@yandex.ru>
> CC: Emacs development discussions <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> This code tries to utilize system malloc features and falls back to legacy
> aligned blocks management code if system malloc implementation is unknown,
> broken, or lacks aligned allocation routines.
> 
> It will be great if someone can help to test this on Windows, OSX, old *BSD
> and other non-GNU/Linux systems

What exactly would you like us to test, beyond the fact that the
patched sources compile?

Anyway, I don't understand the motivation for the changes you've done
relative to the previous version.  In particular:

> +#if ! HAVE_POSIX_MEMALIGN && ! HAVE_WORKING_MEMALIGN && ! _MSC_VER

Why only _MSC_VER is being tested here?  This will only catch the MSVC
build of Emacs, but will miss the MinGW (GCC-based) Windows build and
the MS-DOS build.  If you wanted to catch all of them, you should test
DOS_NT instead.

> +#ifdef HAVE_POSIX_MEMALIGN
> +  if (posix_memalign (&val, BLOCK_ALIGN, nbytes))
> +    val = NULL;
> +#elif HAVE_WORKING_MEMALIGN
> +  val = memalign (BLOCK_ALIGN, nbytes);
> +#elif _MSC_VER
> +  /* Yes, the order of arguments is correct.  */
> +  val = _aligned_malloc (nbytes, BLOCK_ALIGN);
> +#else
> +  val = internal_align_alloc (nbytes);
> +#endif

The _MSC_VER part is not right, IMO.  The Windows build, whether MinGW
or MSVC, uses gmalloc.c for its malloc implementation, with sbrk
(implemented in w32heap.c) that calls directly into the VM allocation
APIs, and is thus similar to mmap-based memory allocation on Posix
hosts, in that it doesn't suffer from fragmentation.

By contrast, _aligned_malloc is most probably a very thin wrapper
around MS runtime implementation of malloc (MS documentation says
"_aligned_malloc is based on malloc"), and we certainly don't want to
use that malloc in Emacs, because it will be definitely prone to
severe fragmentation problems.

So, unless I'm missing something, the MS-Windows build (and also the
MS-DOS one) should defined HAVE_POSIX_MEMALIGN and use its
implementation provided by gmalloc.c.  Unless, that is, you think that
gmalloc's implementation of posix_memalign is not good enough, in
which case we will be much better off improving it than switching to
MS's malloc.