Documentation update for new M_AWAIT flag to kernel malloc, plus revamp

the descriptions of the flags and return value.
This commit is contained in:
Matthew Dillon 1998-12-23 01:05:06 +00:00
parent 1ddb20703d
commit 367f1374e1

View file

@ -85,7 +85,7 @@ the kernel version takes two more arguments. The
argument further qualifies
.Fn malloc No Ns 's
operational characteristics as follows:
.Bl -tag -offset indent
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Dv M_NOWAIT
Causes
.Fn malloc
@ -95,19 +95,45 @@ if the request cannot be immediately fulfilled due to resource shortage.
Otherwise,
.Fn malloc
may call sleep to wait for resources to be released by other processes.
If this flag is not set,
If this flag is set,
.Fn malloc
will never return
.Dv NULL .
Note that
will return
.Dv NULL
rather then block. Note that
.Dv M_WAITOK
is conveniently defined to be 0, and hence may be or'ed into the
.Fa flags
argument to indicate that it's Ok to wait for resources.
is defined to be 0, meaning that blocking operation is the default.
.It Dv M_AWAIT
Causes
.Fn malloc
to call
.Fn asleep
if the request cannot be immediately fulfilled due to a resource shortage.
M_AWAIT is not useful alone and should always be or'd with M_NOWAIT to allow
malloc to call
.Fn asleep
and return
.Dv NULL
immediately. It is expected that the caller will at some point call
.Fn await
and then retry the allocation. Depending on the routine in question, the
caller may decide to propogate the temporary failure up the call chain
and actually have some other higher level routine block on the async wait
that
.Fn malloc
queued.
.It Dv M_WAITOK
indicates that it is Ok to wait for resources. It is unconveniently
defined as 0 so care should be taken never to compare against this value
directly or try to AND it as a flag. The default operation is to block
until the memory allocation succeeds.
.Fn malloc
can only return
.Dv NULL
if
.Dv M_NOWAIT
is specified.
.El
.Pp
Currently, only one flag is defined.
.Pp
The
.Fa type
argument is used to perform statistics on memory usage, and for
@ -137,11 +163,23 @@ malloc_type_t M_FOOBUF = {
...
MALLOC(buf, struct foo_buf *, sizeof *buf, M_FOOBUF, M_NOWAIT);
.Be
.Ed
.Sh RETURN VALUES
.Fn malloc
returns a kernel virtual address that is suitably aligned for storage of
any type of object.
any type of object, or
.Dv NULL
if the request could not be satisfied and
.Dv M_NOWAIT
was set. If
.Dv M_AWAIT
was set and
.Fn malloc
returns
.Dv NULL ,
it will call
.Fn asleep
as a side effect.
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr vmstat 8
.Sh DIAGNOSTICS