need a quick allocation tutorial

[ccaudle at pdq.net (ccaudle)]

I am in need of some kind soul to give me a quick tutorial on the relationship 
between the library provided allocation function malloc() and the rtems region 
and partition directives.

For a first basic question, where is the configuration control to make sure 
that memory allocated with malloc isn't using the same memory which is being 
managed by the partition and/or region managers?  Is malloc actually 
implemented as a wrapper on top of the partition manager, or are they managing 
separate memory pools? 
I assume that the whole point of using partitions and regions is that it is 
faster and/or more deterministic than using malloc?

The context of this question is that I need a wrapper function to go between a 
device driver library and RTEMS memory management.
The library is made to be portable, so it just calls out a function for memory 
allocation, which must be supplied by the OS/executive using the library, with 
an argument which can specify requirements of the allocation.
Most of the requirements are a non-issue for RTEMS, such as 
"virtual=physical,"
"non-pageable," etc. that would be a concern in a multi-process paging OS.

The flags of concern (i.e. How do I map these into RTEMS calls?) are 
"non-blocking," to indicate that the allocation must not block when called (so 
that it can be called from within an interrupt service routine, I assume), and 
an alignment parameter to specify memory alignment.
I haven't seen anything in RTEMS memory management which lets you specify 
alignment.

When I get something working I'll post the information I have.  I'm interested 
in the library for block storage devices, but it includes lots of network 
device drivers, as well as a portable wrapping of the BSD network stack.
There seem to be a lot of people looking for network device drivers, so it may 
be of interest to several on the list.

-- Chris Caudle