Linux's Early Boot-Time Physical Memory Allocator Sees Big Speed-Up: ~268s To ~50ms
Comments on “Linux's Early Boot-Time Physical Memory Allocator Sees Big Speed-Up: ~268s To ~50ms”
3 judges. Scored by all three judges. Only the day’s top stories get the claim check. How far stories are checked
Linux 7.4's memblock pull request includes a performance fix to the early boot physical memory allocator in mm/memblock.c. Google engineer Tarun Sahu found that region lookups in memblock_add_range() and memblock_isolate_range() used a linear search, which becomes very slow under heavy fragmentation, such as with Kernel Handover (KHO).
Why it ranked
No. 63 of 93 with a score of 0.58. The panel rated it highest on new information (0.92) and reader interest (0.68), lowest on practical relevance (0.50).
Every answer behind this is in the table under Score.
Score
0.58total under rubric v2.2
- Significance0.56
- Reader interest0.68
- Audience breadth0.52
- Practical relevance0.50
- Substantiated0.67
- Technical depth0.67
- New information0.92
- Counts against: Promotional0.03
- Counts against: Overclaim0.20
Each judge’s answer per question (0–1), their mean and spread, and what the question adds to the score (weight × mean).
| Question | Judge 1 | Judge 2 | Judge 3 | Mean | Spread | Weight | Contribution (weight times mean) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Significance | 0.52 | 0.45 | 0.72 | 0.56 | 0.27 | +0.24 | +0.135 |
| Reader interest | 0.54 | 0.60 | 0.90 | 0.68 | 0.36 | +0.26 | +0.177 |
| Audience breadth | 0.55 | 0.40 | 0.62 | 0.52 | 0.22 | +0.13 | +0.068 |
| Practical relevance | 0.41 | 0.40 | 0.70 | 0.50 | 0.30 | +0.22 | +0.111 |
| Substantiated | 0.58 | 0.60 | 0.84 | 0.67 | 0.26 | +0.05 | +0.034 |
| Technical depth | 0.74 | 0.60 | 0.68 | 0.67 | 0.14 | +0.05 | +0.034 |
| New information | 0.95 | 0.90 | 0.91 | 0.92 | 0.05 | +0.05 | +0.046 |
| Promotional | 0.05 | 0.03 | 0.01 | 0.03 | 0.04 | −0.19 | −0.006 |
| Overclaim | 0.28 | 0.25 | 0.08 | 0.20 | 0.20 | −0.11 | −0.022 |
| Sum of contributions | +0.576 | ||||||
| Claim-check penalty | 0.000 | ||||||
| Total, as published | 0.576 | ||||||
Spread is the highest minus the lowest judge answer. marks a spread above 0.40: the judges disagree, and the story is marked contested.
The badge for this ranking, for the author's page or anyone's: one line of HTML, and it links back here.
<a href="https://rubric.hrih.si/editions/2026-10-25/63/"><img src="https://rubric.hrih.si/badge/2026-10-25/63.svg" alt="Ranked #63 on Rubric, 25 Oct 2026" width="245" height="28"></a>Also covered by
No other coverage was clustered with this story.
Elsewhere
Elsewhere: HN 21 pts, front page
Recorded for context only, checked 25 Oct 2026, 05:46 UTC. It played no part in the ranking.