6lowpan Host with SLAAC, minimum ram footprint

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1

Hello all,

I have ported Riot OS to the atmega256rfr2 and the gnrc_network example works as expected.

My setup is following:

RPI Border Router with an openlabs at86rf233 transceiver and radvd.

Jiminy Host with gnrc_network.

Ping6 with link local from Host to BR and from BR to host works.

Also ping with global Ip works.

Sending UDP Packets works.

Now I want to reduce the RAM footprint to a minimum would need some advice how to proceed.

And another question would be: is it possible to run all necessary modules/layers needed for slaac with only 16Kbytes sram?

And how would you proceed/optimize the gnrc_network example to achieve this.

This question arises as I have ported riot os to an at x mega256 and would like to run it as host, but the sram is only 16kbytes and so

The gnrc_network example is way too large. Removing shell commands helps but is not enough.

Following the memory usage of the full gnrc_network example.

2

Hi Josua,

have you had a look at the gnrc_minimal example? It gives a nice overview about which compile-time parameters you can change to achieve exactly that. In summary this is:

  • Reduce the size of the packet buffer (GNRC_PKTBUF_SIZE). If you are not too verbose with the packets you are sending 512 can be enough (if you have problems you can still choose higher numbers; default configuration is 6KiB).
  • Reduce the size of the (unicast and multicast) IPv6 addresses you can assign to an interface (GNRC_NETIF_IPV6_ADDRS_NUMOF and DGNRC_NETIF_IPV6_GROUPS_NUMOF)
  • Reduce the size of the neighbor cache (GNRC_IPV6_NIB_NUMOF; that is wrong in gnrc_minimal, will fix that ASAP)

If you want to get even more out of it, run the stack in your scenario for a while and check the stack usage of each module, using the ps shell command. The usage should be much lesser than what is actually allocated. You can reduce the stack sizes by modifying the configuration define in the respective module’s header (or override it with CFLAGS).

Hope this was helpful, Martine

3

Hi,

4

Hi Martine,

Would you mind if I put these suggestions on a wiki page? Of course it get a nice “Here be dragons” warning. :slight_smile:

Regards, Koen

5

Hi,

is anyone finding anything in the Wiki? I rather would add it to the Doxygen. What do you think?

Cheers, Martine

6

Hi Josua,

I have ported Riot OS to the atmega256rfr2 and the gnrc_network example works as expected.

Now I want to reduce the RAM �footprint to a minimum would need some advice how to proceed.

I have a branch in [1] that tries to disable as much as possible in order to make tests/minimal smaller. Most of it won't be of much use as you're using gnrc, but maybe you find some inspiration.

Some ideas:

- reduce the number of allowed threads and priority levels to exactly what you need - disable all stdio (see also [2]) - compile with LTO=1

Kaspar

[1] GitHub - kaspar030/RIOT at minimize [2] sys: make uart_stdio RX optional by kaspar030 · Pull Request #7974 · RIOT-OS/RIOT · GitHub

7

Hey Josua!

If you're not using RPL, then you should disable it in the Makefile. `gnrc_networking` is shipping with RPL enabled. It's sufficient to remove the `USEMODULE += gnrc_rpl` line in the Makefile.

You can also get some inspiration from the Makefile of the `gnrc_minimal` example. Especially from the `CFLAGS` line there.

Cheers! Cenk