The original TLSF PR (https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/pull/1215)
contained a big patch that modified the TLSF API.

Vanilla TLSF functions take as a first argument a pointer to a
"control block" which define a collection of memory pools. The
allocation functions only work within the provided control block.
The parch removes this parameters and creates a global control block.

-void* tlsf_malloc(tlsf_t tlsf, size_t size)
+void* tlsf_malloc(size_t size)

There's some issues with that:

- The new API is not documented anywhere. If someone looks at the
official TLSF repo, the functions are different to the RIOT pkg.
- The patch removes the option to have multiple "control blocks"
(that is, independent heap spaces). I want this feature for the
Lua interpreter.


I propose to undo the parts of the patch that modify the TLSF api.

The pkg already adds a layer on top of TLSF that implements
malloc/free/etc that is meant to be used by application programs. The
global control block could be defined there. Additionally, I think that
that layer should be in a proper C file that can be read by people and
by Doxygen instead of in a patch.

I grep'd the RIOT source and the tlsf_* functions are not used anywhere,
so this change should not break anything as long as the malloc-tlsf
wrapper still works.
The original PR says:

> This PKG is not meant to be used by applicitions directly, but by the
> boards.
> The board's initialition code needs to call
> int tlsf_add_pool(void *mem, size_t bytes) for every free memory
> region it has.

Another issues is whether it is OK for modules to use private heaps. In
the case of an interpreter, I think it is a good idea to be able to
isolate the VM from the rest of the system.

Regards,

-- 
Juan Ignacio Carrano <j.carr...@fu-berlin.de>
RAPStore

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