Dynamic memory allocation

A good device driver should support neither more than one peripheral and (possibly) not a fixed number of them! However, even if we decide to restrict driver usage to just one peripheral, it may happen that we need to manage a variable number of data chunks so, in any case, we need to be able to manage dynamic memory allocation.

In this recipe, we will see how we can dynamically (and safely) allocate chunks of memory in the kernel space.

How to do it...

In order to show how we can allocate from memory within the kernel by using kmalloc(), vmalloc(), and kvmalloc(), we can again use a kernel module.

Inside the mem_alloc.c file, we can see some really simple code that shows how memory allocation works...