AllocPooled

Allocate memory with the pool manager (V39)

Allocate memSize bytes of memory, and return a pointer. NULL is returned if the allocation fails.

Doing a DeletePool() on the pool will free all of the puddles and thus all of the allocations done with AllocPooled() in that pool. (No need to FreePooled() each allocation)

poolHeader

a specific private pool header.

memSize

the number of bytes to allocate

A pointer to the memory, or NULL. The memory block returned is long word aligned.

The result of any memory allocation MUST be checked, and a viable error handling path taken. ANY allocation may fail if memory has been filled.

Memory allocation and deallocation as well as querying how much memory is available requires a Task or, by extension, a Process. None of the exec kernel memory management operations is safe to call from interrupt code!

Both AllocPooled() and FreePooled() require an arbitration mechanism to work correctly. The use of ObtainSemaphore()/ReleaseSemaphore() is recommended.

If you port source code written for use on AmigaOS 4 to AmigaOS 3.x, be aware that AmigaOS 4 features an integrated arbitration mechanism which can be activated at pool creation time through the ASOPOOL_Protected tag. Likely, there will be no explicit use of the ObtainSemaphore() and ReleaseSemaphore() functions.

You should make sure that an arbitration mechanism exists for the ported code or you may experience stability issues and undefined behaviour caused by overlapping memory pool operations.

The pool functions do not protect an individual pool from multiple accesses. The reason is that in most cases the pools will be used by a single task. If your pool is going to be used by more than one task you must Semaphore protect the pool from having more than one task trying to allocate within the same pool at the same time. Warning: Forbid() protection *will not work* in the future. *Do NOT* assume that we will be able to make it work in the future. AllocPooled() may well break a Forbid() and as such can only be protected by a semaphore.

To track sizes yourself, the following code can be used: Assumes a6=ExecBase

Allocations should not exceed 4294967288 (0xFFFFFFF8) bytes because this may trigger a side-effect leading to far less memory to be allocated.

FreePooled(), CreatePool(), DeletePool()