This was a premature optimization from the early days of SerenityOS.
The eternal heap was a simple bump pointer allocator over a static
byte array. My original idea was to avoid heap fragmentation and improve
data locality, but both ideas were rooted in cargo culting, not data.
We would reserve 4 MiB at boot and only ended up using ~256 KiB, wasting
the rest.
This patch replaces all kmalloc_eternal() usage by regular kmalloc().
Since it's possible to determine where the small zones will start to
occur for each PhysicalRegion, we can use arithmetic so that the call
time for both large and small zones is identical.
Most of the time, we will be freeing physical pages within the
full-sized zones. We can do some simple math to find the right zone
immediately instead of looping through the zones, checking each one.
We still do loop through the slack/remainder zones at the end.
There's probably an even nicer way to solve this, but this is already a
nice improvement. :^)