Buffer Management Unit Dynamic Allocation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional computing systems face resource-intensive buffer management, where processing cores are heavily involved in allocating and releasing buffers, leading to significant resource consumption.
Innovation Solution
A system-on-chip (SOC) with a buffer management unit (BMU) that dynamically allocates and reallocates buffer pointers between internal and external pointer pools, maintaining a balance by monitoring threshold values to ensure efficient buffer management and reduce processing core load.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If processing core manages buffer allocation and release, then buffer management is performed, but processing core resources are heavily consumed
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts buffer management functionality from the processing core and relocates it to a dedicated buffer management unit (BMU). The BMU independently handles buffer allocation, monitoring, and threshold-based reallocation without involving the processing core, thereby eliminating the resource consumption burden on the processing core while maintaining efficient buffer management.
Solution Approach 2:
The buffer management unit operates autonomously using self-service mechanisms. It continuously monitors the number of unassigned buffer pointers in the internal pool, automatically triggers reallocation from external memory when thresholds are breached, and manages buffer lifecycle without external intervention, making the system self-sufficient in buffer management tasks.
2Reliability
If more buffer addresses are kept in SOC, then buffer availability increases, but storage space requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements dynamic buffer management where the SOC maintains only a threshold-based portion of buffer addresses internally rather than all buffers. The BMU dynamically monitors buffer availability and automatically reallocates buffers from external memory to internal memory based on real-time conditions, optimizing the balance between buffer availability and storage space utilization.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-allocating a reserved number of buffer addresses in external memory before they are needed. When the internal buffer pool approaches exhaustion, the BMU proactively triggers reallocation from the pre-prepared external buffer pool, ensuring buffer availability is maintained without requiring excessive internal storage space.
Data Source
AI summary
Some of the embodiments of the present disclosure provide a method comprising managing a plurality of buffer addresses in a system-on-chip (SOC); and if a number of available buffer addresses in the SOC falls below a low threshold value, obtaining one or more buffer addresses from a memory, which is external to the SOC, to the SOC. Other embodiments are also described and claimed.