I discovered that dropbear, especially when using libz for compression/decompression, causes memory fragmentation in uClinux - to the point that the system doesn't have enough contiguous memory to continue to function after ~24 hours. This will be a problem for any system that doesn't have an MMU. Normally, programs specifically targeted for uClinux will allocate all memory statically and the program itself will load execute in place (EIP) from a romfs.
Thankfully, dropbear has wrapper functions for malloc and related calls that can easily be replaced globally. I have integated the bget memory manager with dropbear. Dropbear will initially get a large chunk of system memory, then all future memory allocations are handled by bget, resulting in no system memory fragmentation. I also use bget for libtommath and libtomcrypt. I'm posting this to see if there is any interest in a patch with bget integration. If not, this e-mail can serve as a search result for someone to make a request in the future. Farrell
