Added new malloc type in our MEM module; using the unix feature 'mmap'.

In Orange we've been fighting the past weeks with memory usage a lot...
at the moment incredible huge scenes are being rendered, with multiple
layers and all compositing, stressing limits of memory a lot.
I had hoped that less frequently used blocks would be swapped away
nicely, so fragmented memory could survive. Unfortunately (in OSX) the
malloc range is limited to 2 GB only (upped half of address space).
Other OS's have a limit too, but typically larger afaik.

Now here's mmap to the rescue! It has a very nice feature to map to
a virtual (non existing) file, allowing to allocate disk-mapped memory
on the fly. For as long there's real memory it works nearly as fast as
a regular malloc, and when you go to the swap boundary, it knows nicely
what to swap first.

The upcoming commit will use mmap for all large memory blocks, like
the composit stack, render layers, lamp buffers and images. Tested here
on my 1 GB system, and compositing huge images with a total of 2.5 gig
still works acceptable here. :)

http://www.blender.org/bf/memory.jpg
This is a silly composit test, using 64 MB images with a load of nodes.
Check the header print... the (2323.33M) is the mmap disk-cache in use.

BTW: note that is still limited to the virtual address space of 4 GB.

The new call is:
MEM_mapalloc()

Per definition, mmap() returns zero'ed memory, so a calloc isn't required.

For Windows there's no mmap() available, but I'm pretty sure there's an
equivalent. Windows gurus here are invited to insert that here in code! At
the moment it's nicely ifdeffed, so for Windows the mmap defaults to a
regular alloc.

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/intern/guardedalloc/MEM_guardedalloc.h b/intern/guardedalloc/MEM_guardedalloc.h
index e909e7eee45..c9338d0ae8a 100644
--- a/intern/guardedalloc/MEM_guardedalloc.h
+++ b/intern/guardedalloc/MEM_guardedalloc.h
@@ -87,12 +87,17 @@ extern "C" {
 	 * Allocate a block of memory of size len, with tag name str. The
 	 * memory is cleared. The name must be static, because only a
 	 * pointer to it is stored ! */
-	void *MEM_callocN(unsigned int len, char * str);
+	void *MEM_callocN(unsigned int len, const char * str);
 	
 	/** Allocate a block of memory of size len, with tag name str. The
-	 * name must be a static, because only a pointer to it is stored !
-	 * */
-	void *MEM_mallocN(unsigned int len, char * str);
+		* name must be a static, because only a pointer to it is stored !
+		* */
+	void *MEM_mallocN(unsigned int len, const char * str);
+	
+	/** Same as callocN, clears memory and uses mmap (disk cached) if supported.
+		Can be free'd with MEM_freeN as usual.
+		* */
+	void *MEM_mapallocN(unsigned int len, const char * str);
 
 	/** Print a list of the names and sizes of all allocated memory
 	 * blocks. */