Re: Driver-level memory management

[Ingo Oeser <ioe-lkml@rameria.de>]

Hi Michael,

On Sunday 12 August 2007, Michael Bourgeous wrote:
> I'm working on a driver for older HDTV cards based on the TL880 chip.
> These cards typically have 16MB of their own memory, which is
> available to me over the PCI bus.  Various functions of the card
> require me to manage this memory, allocating and freeing chunks of it
> as necessary.  I can easily include my own allocation and management
> code, 

Ok.

> but I'm sure this is a problem that has been solved before. 

Yes!

in your Kconfig

select GENERIC_ALLOCATOR

in your driver.c

#include <linux/genalloc.h>

Code is in lib/genalloc.c, if you like to take a look.

Memory for MANAGING free/allocated space is NOT taken 
from your on-card memory! That allocator is explicitly developed
for such use cases.

Happy hacking!


Best regards

Ingo Oeser
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