L4 Environment Library Reference Manual
The L4 Environment Library is a collection of functions and glue code to support applications which use the Common L4 Environment. It provides
- startup code which initialized the various L4env libraries
- common type definitions / functions / defines
- functions to request various configuration parameters
- misc. support functions for other L4env libraries
The L4 Environment Library provides a very simple memory allocator based on the idea of slab caches (Jeff Bonwick: "
The Slab Allocator: An Object-Caching Kernel Memory Allocator"). It is not an independent library for several reasons:
- it is not a full-grown Slab Cache implementation. The size of a single slab is exactly one page, multi-paged slabs are not implemented. According to the Slab Allocator paper this kind of an implementation is suitable for objects up to a size of 1/8th of a page, which is about 500 bytes in this implementation (the slab descriptor is also stored on the page, so it's not 512 bytes ;-)
- there is no synchronization at all. This is due to the special requirements of the other L4env libraries. E.g. the Region Mapper needs no special synchronization, all operations are serialized by the region mapper thread. The Semaphore library also requires no synchronization, it implements the basic L4 environment synchronization primitive.
Of course this implementation can be used to build a fully-featured Slab Allocator. See Slab Allocator module for a description of the API.
