Re: ALSA: remove magic cast (0/6)

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:38:45 +0300,
Pekka J Enberg wrote:
> 
> Hi, 
> 
> Jaroslav Kysela writes:
> > I think that we need to separate the patch: 
> > 
> > 1) removal of own memory pool (check for memory leaks)
> > 2) magic stuff
> 
> I only replaced snd_kcalloc() and snd_magic_kcalloc() with the new generic 
> kcalloc() and removed snd_magic_cast so the kmalloc wrappers are still in 
> place. 

I agree with Jaroslav.   To make the things easy, let's split the
patch.

1. addition of kcalloc()

2. replacement of snd_kcalloc with kcalloc

3. removal of magic stuff
   - replace snd_magic_kmalloc/kcalloc to kmalloc/kcalloc.
   - replace snd_magic_kfree to kfree.
   - replace snd_magic_cast to normal cast.
   - remove the rest of magic-related codes/files.


Then only the memory tracking (called memory pool in above) will remain.

> Jaroslav Kysela writes:
> > I don't like too much the idea to remove the own memory pool in the debug
> > mode. It helped me in past numerous times and I think that ALSA is one
> > from the clean subsystems in this area. I don't understand the kernel
> > developers - there is no replacement. Yes, it's good only for debugging,
> > but why not make debugging easier for other developers as well with
> > proposing a general solution?
> 
> What memory pool? To me, it looks like sound/core/memory.c just maintains a 
> list of kmallocs and vmallocs we check when snd_memory_done() is called. 

Jaroslav mentioned this, too.

> Perhaps we could make it somehow automagically per-module for debug builds 
> to make it generic? Memory leak check could be done at module_exit. 

I thought of a similar thing.  It will be more useful to make it
generic.

For now, until the generic debug code like the above is implmented in
the generic slab/kmalloc layer, we can keep it inside the ALSA.
We can safely clean up the other stuff beforehand.


How about this?


Takashi


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