Reusing the slab allocator

Reusing the slab allocator

[Jon Smirl]

We need a memory manager for the VRAM on video cards. The most common
video cards have been 2MB and 512MB memory. Is it possible to reuse
the kernel slab allocator for managing this memory?

There are a couple of other odd constraints.
1) Some objects need to be allocated on boundaries, like 64B or even
1KB divisible addresses.
2) It would be best if the allocation bookkeeping data structures were
kept in system RAM. It may not be simple to access VRAM for read/write
of bookkeeping info. VRAM  can require slow PCI cycles or need high
mem mappings to access.

If possible I'd rather reuse an existing manager than write a new one.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com

Re: Reusing the slab allocator

[Pekka Enberg]

On 8/10/05, Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com> wrote:
> We need a memory manager for the VRAM on video cards. The most common
> video cards have been 2MB and 512MB memory. Is it possible to reuse
> the kernel slab allocator for managing this memory?
> 
> There are a couple of other odd constraints.
> 1) Some objects need to be allocated on boundaries, like 64B or even
> 1KB divisible addresses.
> 2) It would be best if the allocation bookkeeping data structures were
> kept in system RAM. It may not be simple to access VRAM for read/write
> of bookkeeping info. VRAM  can require slow PCI cycles or need high
> mem mappings to access.
> 
> If possible I'd rather reuse an existing manager than write a new one.

Alternatively, take a look at vmem allocator described in Magazines
and Vmem: Extending the Slab Allocator to Many CPUs and Arbitrary
Resources by Bonwick. AFAIK the slab allocator in Solaris is built on
vmem.

                                   Pekka