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().
We now use AK::Error and AK::ErrorOr<T> in both kernel and userspace!
This was a slightly tedious refactoring that took a long time, so it's
not unlikely that some bugs crept in.
Nevertheless, it does pass basic functionality testing, and it's just
real nice to finally see the same pattern in all contexts. :^)
Previously there was a mix of returning plain strings and returning
explicit string views using `operator ""sv`. This change switches them
all to standardized on `operator ""sv` as it avoids a call to strlen.