mm/README.txt
=============
This directory contains the NuttX memory management logic. This include:
1) The standard memory management functions as prototyped in stdlib.h as
specified in the Base definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001. This
include the files:
o Standard Interfaces: mm_malloc.c, mm_calloc.c, mm_realloc.c,
mm_memalign.c, mm_free.c
o Less-Standard Interfaces: mm_zalloc.c, mm_mallinfo.c
o Internal Implementation: mm_initialize.c mm_sem.c mm_addfreechunk.c
mm_size2ndx.c mm_shrinkchunk.c, mm_internal.h
o Build and Configuration files: Kconfig, Makefile
Memory Models:
o Small Memory Model. If the MCU supports only 16-bit data addressing
then the small memory model is automatically used. The maximum size
of the heap is then 64K. The small memory model can also be forced
MCUs with wider addressing by defining CONFIG_SMALL_MEMORY in the
NuttX configuration file.
o Large Memory Model. Otherwise, the allocator uses a model that
supports a heap of up to 4G.
This implementation uses a variable length allocator with the following
properties:
o Overhead: Either 8- or 4-bytes per allocation for large and small
models, respectively.
o Alignment: All allocations are aligned to 8- or 4-bytes for large
and small models, respectively.
2) Test Program. There is also a host-best test program that can be
used to verify the memory manager. These are the file:
Makefile.test, mm_test.c, and mm_environment.h.
Build instructions:
make -f Makefile.test
The executable will be built in the top-level directory as nuttx/mm_text
(or mm_test.exe under Cygwin).
3) Granule Allocator. A non-standard granule allocator is also available
in this directory The granule allocator allocates memory in units
of a fixed sized block ("granule"). Allocations may be aligned to a user-
provided address boundary.
The granule allocator interfaces are defined in nuttx/include/nuttx/gran.h.
The granule allocator consists of these files in this directory:
mm_gran.h, mm_granalloc.c, mm_grancritical.c, mm_granfree.c
mm_graninit.c
The granule allocator is not used anywhere within the base NuttX code
as of this writing. The intent of the granule allocator is to provide
a tool to support platform-specific management of aligned DMA memory.
NOTE: Because each granule may be aligned and each allocation is in
units of the granule size, selection of the granule size is important:
Larger granules will give better performance and less overhead but more
losses of memory due to quantization waste. Additional memory waste
can occur from alignment; Of course, heap alignment should no be
used unless (a) you are using the granule allocator to manage DMA memory
and (b) your hardware has specific memory alignment requirements.
The current implementation also restricts the maximum allocation size
to 32 granules. That restriction could be eliminated with some
additional coding effort, but currently requires larger granule
sizes for larger allocations.
Geneneral Usage Example. This is an example using the GCC section
attribute to position a DMA heap in memory (logic in the linker script
would assign the section .dmaheap to the DMA memory.
FAR uint32_t g_dmaheap[DMAHEAP_SIZE] __attribute__((section(.dmaheap)));
The heap is created by calling gran_initialize. Here the granual size
is set to 64 bytes and the alignment to 16 bytes:
GRAN_HANDLE handle = gran_initialize(g_dmaheap, DMAHEAP_SIZE, 6, 4);
Then the GRAN_HANDLE can be used to allocate memory (There is no
GRAN_HANDLE if CONFIG_GRAN_SINGLE=y):
FAR uint8_t *dma_memory = (FAR uint8_t *)gran_alloc(handle, 47);
The actual memory allocates will be 64 byte (wasting 17 bytes) and
will be aligned at least to (1 << log2align).
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