General Purpose Memory Allocation

The microkernel provides general purpose memory management services for device drivers that need to dynamically allocate and free pieces of memory in supervisor memory space. As initialization schemes are normally dynamic, device drivers need to dynamically allocate and free small pieces of supervisor data.

Typically, a device driver needs to dynamically allocate data associated to each instance that it will register in the Device Registry at initialization time. Moreover, most of the DDI services called from base level by the driver clients lead to the dynamic allocation and freeing of certain linked list elements for internal management purposes.

The memory allocated using these services is anonymous. That means it is not associated to any actor context. For this reason, all the allocated memory must be freed by drivers before they terminate, as the kernel won't be able to do it at actor deletion time.

General purpose memory allocation related services are described below. See the man pages for complete descriptions of listed commands:

svMemAlloc

allocates a specified amount of memory from the supervisor address space

svMemFree

frees memory previously allocated with svMemAlloc