Hi Antony, On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 06:03:46PM +0400, Antony Pavlov wrote: > This patch series adds the tlsf memory allocator to barebox. > > TLSF: Two Level Segregated Fit memory allocator implementation. > Written by Matthew Conte (matt@xxxxxxxxxxx). > Public Domain, no restrictions. > > [RFC PATCH 1/3] import TLSF 2.0 > [RFC PATCH 2/3] adapt tlsf for barebox > [RFC PATCH 3/3] add tlsf-based malloc implementation The tlsf code looks really nice. Not that I even tried to understand it, but it looks like one *could* understand the code when he has to (unlike the dlmalloc code). It is also smaller in binary space and it has the great advantage of having memory pools. Memory pools can be useful to seperate the general malloc space from the ramfs malloc space, so that a full ramfs does not crash barebox. It could also be used to implement dma_alloc_coherent(). Unfortunately there are two downsides. As the author already says on the webpage it's slightly slower than dlmalloc. That's ok as long we do not store big files in ramfs. The second one is that it needs a memset(pool, 0, size) on initialization. Without it I was not able to test your patches as barebox crashes before even the console was initialized. This memset can take quite a long time. Maybe we should ask Matthew if we really have to clear the pool completely or if it's enough to clear certain parts of it. Overall I think we should give these patches a try as an alternative malloc implementation with the perspective of replacing dlmalloc completely some day. Sascha -- Pengutronix e.K. | | Industrial Linux Solutions | http://www.pengutronix.de/ | Peiner Str. 6-8, 31137 Hildesheim, Germany | Phone: +49-5121-206917-0 | Amtsgericht Hildesheim, HRA 2686 | Fax: +49-5121-206917-5555 | _______________________________________________ barebox mailing list barebox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/barebox
