Linux 7.4 speeds up the boot-time memory allocator 5,000× with a binary search
On October 24, 2026, a patch from Google engineer Tarun Sahu replaces the linear search in Linux’s boot-time memory allocator with a binary search in mm/memblock.c. KHO memory retrieval drops from 268 seconds to 50 milliseconds, a gain that matters most for reboot-free kernel updates.