What do you think about this patch to heap?

Kernel
1

armandas wrote on Sunday, March 31, 2013:

I’ve been reading through the memory management code, trying to understand how it works and made a couple of changes as I went along. These changes can be applied to heap_2.c and heap_4.c files.

The first part changes the way pvReturn is assigned a value. The current code is not broken, but it was not clear to me why you would use pxPreviousBlock->pxNextFreeBlock when pxBlock points to the same location.

The changes in the second part may actually be usefull, as they get rid of a couple unused variables.

Here’s the diff. Let me know what you think.

--- heap_2.c
+++ heap_2v2.c
@@ -214,7 +214,7 @@
 			{
 				/* Return the memory space - jumping over the xBlockLink structure
 				at its start. */
-				pvReturn = ( void * ) ( ( ( unsigned char * ) pxPreviousBlock->pxNextFreeBlock ) + heapSTRUCT_SIZE );
+				pvReturn = ( void * ) ( ( ( unsigned char * ) pxBlock ) + heapSTRUCT_SIZE );
 
 				/* This block is being returned for use so must be taken out of the
 				list of free blocks. */
@@ -237,7 +237,7 @@
 					prvInsertBlockIntoFreeList( ( pxNewBlockLink ) );
 				}
 				
-				xFreeBytesRemaining -= pxBlock->xBlockSize;
+				xFreeBytesRemaining -= xWantedSize;
 			}
 		}
 	}
@@ -259,17 +259,11 @@
 
 void vPortFree( void *pv )
 {
-unsigned char *puc = ( unsigned char * ) pv;
 xBlockLink *pxLink;
 
 	if( pv != NULL )
 	{
-		/* The memory being freed will have an xBlockLink structure immediately
-		before it. */
-		puc -= heapSTRUCT_SIZE;
-
-		/* This casting is to keep the compiler from issuing warnings. */
-		pxLink = ( void * ) puc;
+		pxLink = ( void * ) ( ( ( unsigned char * ) pv ) - heapSTRUCT_SIZE );
 
 		vTaskSuspendAll();
 		{
2

rtel wrote on Monday, April 01, 2013:

Thank you for your feedback.

- xFreeBytesRemaining -= pxBlock->xBlockSize;
+ xFreeBytesRemaining -= xWantedSize;

This is how the code was originally, but resulted in xFreeBytesRemaining being set correctly under certain circumstances - you would have to search the support forum archive to see exactly when, but according to the change history the change was made in FreeRTOS V6.1.0 (you can see how the code was before here.

-unsigned char *puc = ( unsigned char * ) pv;

The code uses that variable just for clarity.  I think the variable would most likely be optimised away with compiler optimisation on anyway.

Regards.