Changeset bb68433 in mainline for doc/mm

Timestamp:

2006-02-08T22:58:06Z (19 years ago)

Author:

Ondrej Palkovsky <ondrap@…>

Branches:

lfn, master, serial, ticket/834-toolchain-update, topic/msim-upgrade, topic/simplify-dev-export

Children:

7e4e532

Parents:

85dc2e7

Message:

Changed malloc to include second parameter and documented
recommended usage.
Added zone merging, made ia32 & amd64 to merge found zones.

File:

• doc/mm (modified) (1 diff)

doc/mm

@@ -66 +66 @@
 There is only one global page hash table in the system shared by all address
 spaces.
+
+2.1 General allocator
+
+'malloc' function accepts flags as a second argument. The flags are directly
+passed to the underlying frame_alloc function. 
+
+1) If the flags parameter contains FRAME_ATOMIC, the allocator will not sleep.
+   The allocator CAN return NULL, when memory is not directly available.
+   The caller MUST check if NULL was not returned
+
+2) If the flags parameter does not contain FRAME_ATOMIC, the allocator
+   will never return NULL, but it CAN sleep indefinitely. The caller
+   does not have to check the return value.
+
+3) The maximum size that can be allocated using malloc is 128K
+
+Rules 1) and 2) apply to slab_alloc as well. Using SLAB allocator
+to allocate too large values is not recommended.
+