Method and apparatus for controlling memory usage of functional components

Abstract

The present invention relates to methods and devices for controlling memory usage of functional components. The present invention relates to controlling the memory usage of functional components of network interfaces such as routers or switches. A portion of virtual memory organized to include virtual memory pages is reserved (201) for use by functional components. A mapping is formed (202) between the virtual memory pages and physical memory regions implemented in physical memory, and data items providing access to the physical memory regions are written (203) to the one or more physical memory regions. The functional component is enabled to directly access a physical memory region mapped to a virtual memory page such that a read from physical memory (204) provides access to the physical memory region by means of the mapping and the virtual memory address associated with said virtual memory page and the read data item is passed (205) to the functional component.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for controlling memory usage of a functional component which may, but need not be, for example, a network interface of a network element, such as an Internet Protocol "IP" router. Furthermore, the invention relates to a computer program for controlling memory usage of functional components, and to network elements. Background technique [0002] Virtual memory is a concept of memory management technology that involves mapping memory addresses used for processing (called virtual addresses) to physical addresses of physical memory. Virtual memory as seen by the process can appear as a bunch of fixed-length contiguous virtual memory blocks called virtual memory pages, which are the fundamental data unit used to manage the mapping between virtual memory and physical memory. The size of each virtual memory page is preferably a power of 2, such as, but not necessarily, 2 12 Bytes = 4096 bytes. The oper...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Therefore, the inconvenience of the above-mentioned conventional means for managing memory usage is that the operating system must frequently perform memory management for these peripheral components, and, as a consequence, the resources running the operating system may be so heavily loaded that they In some cases constitutes a bottleneck that limits the capacity of the entire electronic device

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