Memory Management in the 'new SAM'

[Andrew Bartlett]

Hmm, some more random jottings:  (I intend to collect all of these, and
get them into some kind of development doc)

Memory Management
=================

The 'new SAM' development effort also concerned itself with getting a
sane implementation of memory management.  It was decided that we would
be (as much as possible) talloc based, using an 'internal talloc
context' on many objects.  That is, the creation of an object would
initiate it's own internal talloc context, and this would be used for
all operations on that object.  Much of this is already implemented in
passdb.  Also, like passdb, it will be possible to specify that some
object actually be created on a specified context.  

Memory management is important here because the APIs in the 'new SAM' do
not use 'pdb_init()' or an equivalent.  They always allocate new
objects.  Enumeration's are slightly different, and occur on a supplied
context that 'owns' the entire list, rather than per-element.  (the
enumeration functions return an array of all elements - not full handles
just basic (and public) info)  Likewise for things that fill in a char
**.

For example:

NTSTATUS sam_lookup_sid(const SAM_CONTEXT *context, const NT_USER_TOKEN
*access_token, TALLOC_CTX *mem_ctx, const DOM_SID *sid, char **name,
uint32 *type)

Takes a context to allocate the 'name' on, while:

NTSTATUS sam_get_account_by_sid(const SAM_CONTEXT *context, const
NT_USER_TOKEN *access_token, uint32 access_desired, const DOM_SID
*accountsid, SAM_ACCOUNT_HANDLE **account)

Allocates a handle and stores the allocation context on that handle.

I think that the following:

NTSTATUS sam_enum_accounts(const SAM_CONTEXT *context, const
NT_USER_TOKEN *access_token, const DOM_SID *domainsid, uint16 acct_ctrl,
int32 *account_count, SAM_ACCOUNT_ENUM **accounts)

Should have a TALLOC_CTX, but I'll chase it up.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net