[RFC PATCH 0/3] add tlsf memory allocator

[Sascha Hauer]

On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 10:17:29AM +0100, Sascha Hauer wrote:
> 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 at baisoku.org).
> > 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 issue goes down to a bug in the console drivers. The most console
drivers use xmalloc instead of xzalloc which caused unitialized flags.
Somehow the tlsf allocater triggered this.

So I'm going to merge this series.

Sascha

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