I am trying to port tcmalloc to uclibc. Tcmalloc has a definition for sbrk function, which in turn calls the __sbrk from libc. Uclibc on the other hand does not have __sbrk function, but has sbrk.
Any ideas about how I can call uclibc sbrk from tcmalloc sbrk?
sbrk is a (old) system call, but most memory allocators are built above mmap. See also this question
You should use the syscall, not emulate it. And I would prefer using mmap
, not sbrk
Doing a system call (usually mmap
) is the only way to get more memory from the linux kernel.
From the application's (or library's) point of view, a system call is atomic (it is mostly a single machine instruction like SYSCALL
, SYSENTER
, int 0x80
etc.).