talloc questions - bachelor thesis

[Pavel Březina]

Hello,
I'm working on a bachelor thesis which aims to provide a tutorial and
summary of the best practices for talloc. It is near completion and I
would like to ask you a few questions.

1. When it was released for public use?
2. What other libraries did you consider before choosing to create your
own?
3. What did you miss in those libraries?
4. Which projects use it? I know about Samba, SSSD and nfsim. Are there
any more?
5. Do you have any performance tests that I can reuse?

Thank you. Your help is very appreciated.

Regards,
Pavel Březina.

[Pavel Březina]

On 04/16/2012 10:03 AM, Pavel Březina wrote:

> Hello,
> I'm working on a bachelor thesis which aims to provide a tutorial and
> summary of the best practices for talloc. It is near completion and I
> would like to ask you a few questions.
>
> 1. When it was released for public use?
> 2. What other libraries did you consider before choosing to create your
> own?
> 3. What did you miss in those libraries?
> 4. Which projects use it? I know about Samba, SSSD and nfsim. Are there
> any more?
> 5. Do you have any performance tests that I can reuse?

And one more that I forgot:
6. What are the future plans for talloc?

>
> Thank you. Your help is very appreciated.
>
> Regards,
> Pavel Březina.

[Bjoern Baumbach]

Hi,

On 04/16/2012 10:03 AM, Pavel Březina wrote:
> 4. Which projects use it? I know about Samba, SSSD and nfsim. Are there
> any more?
* CTDB
* Notmuch - The mail indexer

Best regards,
Björn Baumbach

--
SerNet GmbH, Bahnhofsallee 1b, 37081 Göttingen
phone: [phone], fax: [phone]
AG Göttingen, HRB 2816, GF: Dr. Johannes Loxen
http://www.sernet.de, mailto:[hidden email]

[Volker Lendecke]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 10:17:17AM +0200, Pavel Březina wrote:

> On 04/16/2012 10:03 AM, Pavel Březina wrote:
> >Hello,
> >I'm working on a bachelor thesis which aims to provide a tutorial and
> >summary of the best practices for talloc. It is near completion and I
> >would like to ask you a few questions.
> >
> >1. When it was released for public use?
> >2. What other libraries did you consider before choosing to create your
> >own?
> >3. What did you miss in those libraries?
> >4. Which projects use it? I know about Samba, SSSD and nfsim. Are there
> >any more?
> >5. Do you have any performance tests that I can reuse?
>
> And one more that I forgot:
> 6. What are the future plans for talloc?

One thing that is missing is some thread-awareness of
talloc. As long as you use a separate talloc root object
within a thread, everything is fine. But this is not
sufficient: You can not really safely create a new talloc
root for a thread without one big lock. You also can not
move "thread ownership" of a talloc object. We will probably
not make talloc fully thread-safe in all operations, but we
need to be explicit about the rules and possibly add some
operations.

Volker

--
SerNet GmbH, Bahnhofsallee 1b, 37081 Göttingen
phone: [phone], fax: [phone]
AG Göttingen, HRB 2816, GF: Dr. Johannes Loxen
http://www.sernet.de, mailto:[hidden email]

[simo]

On Mon, 2012-04-16 at 10:03 +0200, Pavel Březina wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm working on a bachelor thesis which aims to provide a tutorial and
> summary of the best practices for talloc. It is near completion and I
> would like to ask you a few questions.
>
> 1. When it was released for public use?

The first independent release of talloc was probably in May 2009
according to the date here: https://www.samba.org/ftp/talloc/

However talloc has been part of samba for a long time and has evolved
from a simple wrapper around malloc to become the very useful
hierarchical allocator it is today. If I read git blame right the
hierarchical stuff was basically added around 2005.

> 2. What other libraries did you consider before choosing to create your
> own?

I think Tridge looked at a bunch of libraries, but ultimately none was
addressing the problems we wanted to solve.
If I remember correctly at the time Tridge mentioned he was partly
inspired by a library called halloc (Hierarchical Allocator).

> 3. What did you miss in those libraries?

No other library used the hierarchical concept which is the key for
talloc, and I think halloc was limited and had an awkward API, which
made it not really ideal to use. (but this is from memory, there may
have been other reasons I forgot)

> 4. Which projects use it? I know about Samba, SSSD and nfsim. Are there
> any more?

This has been asked, I think your best bet is to do a web search about
talloc and see what pops up (if only google didn't kill code search ...)

> 5. Do you have any performance tests that I can reuse?

All available tests are in the talloc distribution, afaik.

Simo.

--
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <[hidden email]>
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. <[hidden email]>

[Andreas Schneider-2]

On Thursday 19 April 2012 11:51:56 simo wrote:
> > 4. Which projects use it? I know about Samba, SSSD and nfsim. Are there
> > any more?
>
> This has been asked, I think your best bet is to do a web search about
> talloc and see what pops up (if only google didn't kill code search ...)

http://www.koders.com/default.aspx?s=talloc_new

sourcepuller
OpenBSC (I think all osmo components)
djmount
mp3fs transcoding FUSE filesystem


        -- andreas

--
Andreas Schneider                   GPG-ID: F33E3FC6
www.cryptomilk.org                [hidden email]