Allocator Basics

The kernel memory allocator's job is to parcel out regions of virtual memory to other kernel subsystems (these are commonly called clients). This section explains the basics of the allocator's operation and introduces some terms used later in this guide.

Buffer States

The functional domain of the kernel memory allocator is the set of buffers of virtual memory that make up the kernel heap. These buffers are grouped together into sets of uniform size and purpose, known as caches. Each cache contains a set of buffers. Some of these buffers are currently free, which means that they have not yet been allocated to any client of the allocator. The remaining buffers are allocated, which means that a pointer to that buffer has been provided to a client of the allocator. If no client of the allocator holds a pointer to an allocated buffer, this buffer is said to be leaked, because it cannot be freed. Leaked buffers indicate incorrect code that is wasting kernel resources.

Transactions

A kmem transaction is a transition on a buffer between the allocated and free states. The allocator can verify that the state of a buffer is valid as part of each transaction. Additionally, the allocator has facilities for logging transactions for post-mortem examination.

Sleeping and Non-Sleeping Allocations

Unlike the Standard C Library's malloc(3C) function, the kernel memory allocator can block (or sleep), waiting until enough virtual memory is available to satisfy the client's request. This is controlled by the flag parameter to kmem_alloc(9F). A call to kmem_alloc(9F) which has the KM_SLEEP flag set can never fail; it will block forever waiting for resources to become available.

Kernel Memory Caches

The kernel memory allocator divides the memory it manages into a set of caches. All allocations are supplied from these caches, which are represented by the kmem_cache_t data structure. Each cache has a fixed buffer size, which represents the maximum allocation size satisfied by that cache. Each cache has a string name indicating the type of data it manages.

Some kernel memory caches are special purpose and are initialized to allocate only a particular kind of data structure. An example of this is the “thread_cache,” which allocates only structures of type kthread_t. Memory from these caches is allocated to clients by the kmem_cache_alloc() function and freed by the kmem_cache_free() function.

Caches whose name begins with “kmem_alloc_” implement the kernel's general memory allocation scheme. These caches provide memory to clients of kmem_alloc(9F) and kmem_zalloc(9F). Each of these caches satisfies requests whose size is between the buffer size of that cache and the buffer size of the next smallest cache. For example, the kernel has kmem_alloc_8 and kmem_alloc_16 caches. In this case, the kmem_alloc_16 cache handles all client requests for 9-16 bytes of memory. Remember that the size of each buffer in the kmem_alloc_16 cache is 16 bytes, regardless of the size of the client request. In a 14 byte request, two bytes of the resulting buffer are unused, since the request is satisfied from the kmem_alloc_16 cache.

The last set of caches are those used internally by the kernel memory allocator for its own bookkeeping. These include those caches whose names start with “kmem_magazine_” or “kmem_va_”, the kmem_slab_cache, the kmem_bufctl_cache and others.