palloc

Simple and lightweight block pool allocator intended to be used in RTOS. It has fixed memory block size and fixed allocation and deallocation time.

Size of a pool and a block should be specified in compile time.

Memory organization:

Palloc memory blocks organized in chunks. Each chunk contains 255 blocks and 10 bytes of meta information. It was done so to reduce memory waste on a meta information.

How to build:

Clone the repo, then in repo folder:

• mkdir build && cd build
• cmake .. -DBLOCK_SIZE=32 -DPOOL_SIZE=128
• make

BLOCK_SIZE is size of fixed memory block in bytes, and POOL_SIZE is size of fixed memory pool in blocks. If you don't specify them, default values are: 8 for BLOCK_SIZE and 256000 for POOL_SIZE

After compilation, you'll find libpalloc.a in build/out directory. Note, that by default palloc is built as a static library.

How to use:

Before any allocation, initialize allocator with void palloc_init() function

To get a block of data, use void* palloc_allocate() function

To release a block, use void palloc_free(void* ptr) function

Thread safety:

Currently, palloc has no out of the box thread safety support.

But it can be implemented on a client side. Before adding to your code include line:

#include palloc_heap.h

you can implement macro PALLOC_LOCK() and PALLOC_UNLOCK() to lock and unlock palloc allocate/free functions.

Known problems and workarounds:

• For arm-none-eabi-gcc compiler, set C flag --specs=nosys.specs