Re: [lwip-devel] Purpose of pool memory allocator

[Leon Woestenberg]

Hello Luke,


On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 00:00, address@hidden wrote:
> The other case, which could be a concern for embedded systems, is the
> space overhead of a general purpose allocator. Does anyone have a feel for
> how much overhead there would be if we switched to a general purpose
> allocator for everything?
> 
Good to bring up this question;

What exactly do you mean by a general purpose allocator?

The issue of memory fragmentation comes to mind (in a non-fixed length
allocator). We certainly would want to avoid that.

I think the (modern?) way of power-of-2 pools will suit lwIP fine, but
I have not performed time or memory profiling.

Also, many users are running lwIP on top of an OS, and I think lwIP
should be able to use the underlying memory system without imposing its
own on top.

Regards,

Leon.