#ring-buffer #virtual-memory #buffer #memory-buffer #networking #fixed-size #allocation

magic-buffer

a virtual ring buffer implementation that magically wraps around itself

2 releases

0.1.1 Feb 6, 2024
0.1.0 Jun 12, 2023

#280 in Memory management

26 downloads per month

MIT license

33KB
591 lines

CI crates.io docs.rs

Magic Buffer

A Magic Ring Buffer (or Virtual Ring Buffer) implementation for Rust. magic-buffer provides a simplified way to deal with buffers that wrap around by delegating that logic to hardware.

diagram

The same underlying buffer is mapped twice into memory at adjacent addresses. This allows to wrap around the buffer while still reading forward in the virtual address space.

This behavior is useful for a variety of applications:

  • network protocol parsers with a fixed size buffer
  • VecDec implementations that can provide a consecutive slice of memory (e.g. SliceDeq)
  • IPC ring buffer implementations
[dependencies]
magic-buffer = "0.1"

Examples

Allocating a Buffer

Buffer lens have to be page aligned and follow the allocation granularity of the operating system

use magic_buffer::*;
let buf = MagicBuffer::new(1 << 16).unwrap();
OS Architecture Min Buffer Len
Windows x86_64 64 KiB
Linux x86_64 4 KiB
OSX x86_64 4 KiB
OSX aarch64 16 KiB

** PRs welcome to complete this list

Indexing into a Buffer

use magic_buffer::*;
let mut buf = MagicBuffer::new(1 << 16).unwrap();
buf[0] = b'1';
buf[1] = b'2';

// index wraps around
assert_eq!(buf[0], buf[1 << 16]);
assert_eq!(buf[1], buf[(1 << 16) + 1]);

Slices

use magic_buffer::*;
let buf = MagicBuffer::new(1 << 16).unwrap();

// the whole underlying buffer starting at pos 0
let a = &buf[..];

// the whole underlying buffer starting at pos 1
// then wrapping around with the first byte at the end
let b = &buf[1..];

Dependencies

~0.3–12MB
~87K SLoC