Title: bf_memreq()


After the buffers have been initialized, accessors[] looks like the following:



bf_memreq() allocates accessors to the caller. For example, if 1514 bytes of buffer space are requested immediately after the network process starts and each buffer is 512 bytes (the default), then accessors[] will look like the following:



Note that three elements of accessors[] have been removed from buf512_freelist and that the head of the chain of the 3 accessors is returned by bf_memreq(). Also note that the acc_linkC and buf_linkC fields have been set to one and acc_length and acc_offset have been set to their appropriate values.

So what happens if there are not enough buffers on the buf512_freelist to satisfy a request? On lines 2280-2290 of buf.c, functions that free buffers for the specific clients (e.g., eth_buffree()) are called until there are enough buffers on buf512_freelist.

For a complete description of the network service's buffer management, click here.