Introduction

1.3.3Operating system requirements

The stack requires the following basic services from the target system:

clock tick A clock tick counter must be incremented at regular intervals. See cticks in the section on Timers and multitasking on page 2-8.

memory access

The standard malloc() and free() library calls are ideal. If you do not need a TCP or Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server, these functions are called at startup time only and can be replaced with a static or partition-based scheme.

multitasking

The stack must obtain CPU cycles to process received packets (and handle timeouts) on a timely basis. Two methods are discussed in Task control on page 2-10.