Thursday, 1 August 2013

Solution : Implicit Declaration Of Function malloc error in Linux Kernel

Hi if you get Implicit Declaration Of Function malloc error in Linux Kernel then
solution is use vmalloc or kmalloc


kmalloc: Best used for fast allocations that are smaller than a page (PAGE_SIZE, 0x1000 on most architectures). It doesn't involve mapping memory, so you get the memory straight from the kernel's 1:1 physical memory mapping. You get physically contingent memory. Note that if you you want to allocate more than one page (i.e. order > 0), you risk bumping into external fragmentation issues - i.e. the call might fail even if there is enough free. Higher order - higher chance for allocation failure, and up-time plays a factor here too.

If you want to achieve maximal allocation efficiency then using your own kmem_cache for each type of struct is the way to go (the other benefits for this strategy are being able to monitor the state of your allocations from /proc and catching memory leaks more easily).

vmalloc: Allocations of more than one page. You get mapped-memory in kernel space. Behind the scenes it is similar to what userspace gets - the kernel allocates a bunch of pages and maps them in a virtual address space. This allocation is slower than kmalloc's, and memory accesses might incur a bit more overhead

Avoid vmalloc whenever possible and use kmalloc


kmalloc() should only be used allocating small amounts of memory (a few kb).  vmalloc() is better for larger amounts

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