A.1#【内存管理】——5 引导期内存分配器

在编译期静态初始化所有的内核内存结构体是不现实的，因为硬件配置有太多的排列。尽管只是建立基本的结构体，也是需要内存的，就是后边说的物理页分配器都需要内存初始化自己。但是物理页分配器是如何分配内存初始化自己的呢？

所以Boot　Memory Allocator 登场了

To address this, a specialized allocator called the Boot Memory Allocator is used.
It is based on the most basic of allocators, a First Fit allocator, which uses a bitmap
to represent memory [Tan01] instead of linked lists of free blocks. If a bit is 1, the
page is allocated, and if the bit is 0, it is unallocated. To satisfy allocations of sizes
smaller than a page, the allocator records the Page Frame Number (PFN) of the
last allocation and the offset the allocation ended at. Subsequent small allocations
are merged together and stored on the same page.
The reader may ask why this allocator is not used for the running system. One
compelling reason is that, although the first fit allocator does not suffer badly from
fragmentation [JW98], memory frequently has to be linearly searched to satisfy
an allocation. Because this is examining bitmaps, it gets very expensive, especially
because the first fit algorithm tends to leave many small free blocks at the beginning
of physical memory that still get scanned for large allocations, thus making the
process very wasteful [WJNB95].
There are two very similar but distinct APIs for the allocator. One is for UMA
architectures listed in Table 5.1, and the other is for NUMA listed in Table 5.2. The
principal difference is that the NUMA API must be supplied with the node affected
by the operation, but, because the callers of these APIs exist in the architecturedependent layer, it is not a significant problem.
This chapter begins with a description of the structure that the allocator uses
to describe the physical memory available for each node. I then illustrate how the
limits of physical memory and the sizes of each zone are discovered before talking
about how the information is used to initialize the boot memory allocator structures.
The allocation and free routines are then discussed before finally talking about how
the boot memory allocator is retired