Fragmentation: Is there a solution yet?

Hi All..

I found couple of postings about Bryan's intentions of creating an optional
defragment switch or something similar as a solution to this. Can you tell
me status on that.
We already have 10 devices in the field and are expecting to have 100s more
in next couple of months and we are trapped in this fragmentation issue.

We are using TINI 400 firmware v 1.12. The following is an overview of what
our application does:

In order to provide flexibility for remote update we are running our
application in RAM (size about 88 KB). In order to provide robustness we
have also modified slush to check the intactness of files and to download
them from our server (by making a ppp connection) if file is either
corrupted or is not found (if heap is blasted for some reason). Then finally
it launches the application located in RAM.

Our application is doing bunch of file creation and deletion to save
intermediate configurations/reports etc. And these I guess is leading to
fragmentation problem causing insufficient heap. Also on file update we are
also storing previous version of file so that tini can rollback to it if
this update faces some problem. This will lead to have three copies of about
90 KB file at some moment which i guess would be a bad idea if memory cannot
be defragmented. We can clear heap whenever it runs out of contiguous memory
but that will cause it to download all the files again (using PPP) and lost
all the configuration information too..We wanted to have that functionality
used only extremely necessary (like heap corruption) which may not be that
frequent. But our field devices have suffered this insufficient heap problem
in just couple of weeks. So clearing out heap and downloading files again
doesnt seem good solution here.
We even haven't tried to do any remote updating on these devices yet.

I will greatly appreciate any hint/direction to solve this problem.

Thanks,

Kunal Shah
Software Engineer
SensorLogic | M2M made easy.
972-934-7375 x 2121
972-934-7376 (fax)
[email protected]
www.Sensorlogic.com

_______________________________________________
TINI mailing list
TINI-6tN4nzCoH/[email protected]
To UNSUBSCRIBE, edit your profile, or see list archives:
http://lists.dalsemi.com/mailman/listinfo/tini