Weird behavior of mallocr() function

Denis Micolani micorulez@gmail.com
Tue Jan 5 08:39:00 GMT 2010


> For starters, your linker script is restricting the heap to be 0x400 bytes
> (1024).  That is less that 1344 so your return code makes sense. Malloc
> creates bins to reuse for small allocations so if you are really this
> constrained for space, you won't be able to use the malloc logic in newlib
> and will have to override it.

It seems kinda weird to me that malloc is asking an allocation for
about 1.34Kbytes while I'm just asking for 1 byte. Anyway if that's
the way it works, I got nothing to complain about, I'll just expand
the heap area in the linker script to be a bit larger.


> As well, your current code isn't going to work.  You are adding incr to
> heap_start and comparing this to heap_end (i.e. neither changes).  I'm
> pretty sure you meant to use heap_current_end in your if statement.
> As well, if you are going to have a reentrant version, you might as well set
> errno properly using the reentrant struct that is input.
> See newlib/libc/include/sys/errno.h for the __errno_r macro.

Thanks for pointing that out!


> Most sbrk implementations use the logic found in libgloss/libnosys/sbrk.c
> which has the heap and stack going in opposite directions and allocates a
> lump sum for the two in the linker script. This allows peaks for either the
> stack or heap as long as the total is within limits.  You might want to
> check out this design before implementing your own.

I did not realize there were such a directory with all those useful
functions within, thanks for pointing this out too!


Just one more question: AFAIK, in order to get malloc to be reentrant,
I should provide my own stubs to lock and unlock the memory, these
should be: __malloc_unlock() and __malloc_lock().
Anyway if I define them just like other stubs in the global scope I
get the compiler to fail, saying that there are multiple definitions
of those. Specifically, saying that they were already defined in
newlib-1.18.0/newlib/libc/stdlib/mlock.c .So, how could I manage to
get it to work? Should I place my own stub directly in newlib's source
code and recompile it (it doesn't seem to me like a good idea) ?



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