Open Source Embedded SSL - (License and Memory)

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Thu Dec 4 20:15:36 EST 2003


"J Harper" <jsec at peersec.com> writes:

>>2) Make it functional on systems without memory allocation.  Did I
>>mention that I work on (very) small embedded systems?  Having fixed
>>spaces for variables is useful when you want something to run
>>deterministically for a long time with no resets, and I have yet to
>>find a free bignum library that didn't want to use malloc all the
>>time.
>
>We have implemented a block allocation scheme for our device Web services
>product that would probably solve this issue.  Queues of various structure
>sizes are held within a single chunk of memory.

How common is it to find an embedded system sophisticated enough to have a TCP
stack and ethernet interface (and running SSL), but not sophisticated enough
to have a malloc() implementation?  I've always assumed that anything with the
former will also have the latter (I know there are some highly constrained
embedded platforms used in some web-enabled widgets, but they usually don't
run SSL).  My code will run without malloc() in general, but assumes that if
you have a TCP stack and ethernet then you're also going to have malloc()
support.  For the non-malloc platforms, it's written to grab memory in a FIFO
manner, so you can get away with a simple brk-style allocator.

Peter.

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