Memory unmapping causes slow address space fragmentation, leading in
extreme cases to failing to allocate pages at all. Removing this problem
by keeping all the pages allocated to us, yet calling madvise() to let
kernel dispose of them.
This adds a little complexity and overhead as we have to keep the
pointers to the free pages, therefore to hold e.g. 1 GB of 4K pages with
8B pointers, we have to store 2 MB of data.
We can also quite simply allocate bigger blocks. Anyway, we need these
blocks to be aligned to their size which needs one mmap() two times
bigger and then two munmap()s returning the unaligned parts.
The user can specify -B <N> on startup when <N> is the exponent of 2,
setting the block size to 2^N. On most systems, N is 12, anyway if you
know that your configuration is going to eat gigabytes of RAM, you are
almost forced to raise your block size as you may easily get into memory
fragmentation issues or you have to raise your maximum mapping count,
e.g. "sysctl vm.max_map_count=(number)".
From now, there are no auxiliary pointers stored in the free slab nodes.
This led to strange debugging problems if use-after-free happened in
slab-allocated structures, especially if the structure's first member is
a next pointer.
This also reduces the memory needed by 1 pointer per allocated object.
OTOH, we now rely on pages being aligned to their size's multiple, which
is quite common anyway.
