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There is a lot of data that either flows through various HelenOS subsystems or is stored directly by them. Each subsystem uses its own data structures to represent the data. These data structures need to be kept somewhere. In order to work efficiently, HelenOS, and especially its kernel, deploys several house keeping data types that are designed to facilitate managing other data structures. Most of them serve like generic containers.
HelenOS uses doubly-circularly-linked lists to bind related data together. Lists are composed of an independent sentinel node called head and links that are always part of the object that is to be put into the list. Adding items to a list thus doesn't require any further memory allocations. Head and each link then contains forward and backward pointer. An empty list is composed of a sole head whose both pointers reference the head itself. The expense of two times bigger memory consumption as compared to memory consumption of singly linked lists is justified by constant insertion and removal times at random positions within the list.
Lists are frequently used to implement FIFO behaviour (e.g. scheduler run queues or synchronization wait queues). Contrary to the FIFO type, which is also supported by HelenOS, they don't take up any unused space and are more general. On the other hand, they are slower than in-array FIFOs and can be hardly used to implement buffers.
FIFO queues are implemented as either statically or dynamically allocated arrays[3] of some generic type with two indices. The first index points to the head of the FIFO queue and the other points to the tail thereof. There can be as many items in the FIFO as is the number of elements in the array and no more. The indices are taken modulo size of the queue because as a consequence of insertions and deletions, the tail can have numericaly lower index than the head.
FIFO queues are used, for example, in ASID management code to store inactive ASIDs or in userspace keyboard driver to buffer read characters.
The kernel, as well as userspace, provides hash table data type which uses separate chaining. The hash table type is very generic in that it forces the user to supply methods for computing the hash index, comparing items against a set of keys and the item removal callback function. Besides these virtual operations, the hash table is composed of a dynamically allocated array of list heads that represent each chain, number of chains and the maximal number of keys.
Several bitmap operations such as clearing or setting consecutive bit sequences as well as copying portions of one bitmap into another one are supported.
HelenOS makes use of a variant of B-tree called B+tree. B+trees, in HelenOS implementation, are 3-4-5 balanced trees. They are characteristic by the fact that values are kept only in the leaf-level nodes and that these nodes are linked together in a list. This data structure has logaritmic search, insertion and deletion times and, thanks to the leaf-level list, provides fantastic means of walking the nodes containing data. Moreover, B+trees can be used for easy storing, resizing and merging of disjunctive intervals.
