Having looked at the layout of a cache and descriptors involved at a generic level, let's push further to view specific data structures used by the slub allocator and explore the management of free lists. A slub defines its version of cache descriptor, struct kmem_cache, in kernel header /include/linux/slub-def.h:
struct kmem_cache { struct kmem_cache_cpu __percpu *cpu_slab; /* Used for retriving partial slabs etc */ unsigned long flags; unsigned long min_partial; int size; /* The size of an object including meta data */ int object_size; /* The size of an object without meta data */ int offset; /* Free pointer offset. */ int cpu_partial; /* Number of per cpu partial objects to keep around */ struct kmem_cache_order_objects ...
