[cjwoodall]

Linked-Lists often get used in low-level code and embedded systems in situations where you might need multiple statically allocated entries to be turned into a list of unknown length. There certainly are times where this comes in useful, but it is also a memory constrained space with an emphasis on determinism, where malloc and new can be bad ideas.

There is a time and a place for them, but if you need speed I agree... there are better solutions

[HelloNurse]

An OS kernel has no business maintaining, and even less business accessing in bulk, large data structures that are performance-critical enough to worry about coherent memory access. It is also an infrastructure-deprived environment in which swapping around pointers to implement a linked list with correct locking is relatively easy to get right but allocating vectors is out of the question.

[dom0]

> An OS kernel has no business maintaining, and even less business accessing in bulk, large data structures that are performance-critical enough to worry about coherent memory access

File systems are usually part of the kernel.

[scott_s]

File systems tend not to have large data structures. They are relatively modest data structures which manage bulk access to large blocks of data. A subtle distinction, but important in this context.

[IgorPartola]

Really? Even huge volumes with loads of tiny files? Mail and Usenet servers? Build servers? What is your definition of large and modest here?

[rosser]

The data structures under discussion here are those used to track individual files. Yes, there can be squillions of them, but as data structures, they are, in fact, rather modest.