Hi All,

My target has 128k SRAM which has about 60k spare, and 64k CCM which is allocated whole to FreeRTOS stacks etc (its private heap, memory model #4).

I am running a simplified HTTP server (for local config etc), which uses fairly minimal RAM (a few k), and an HTTPS/TLS client which uses about 50k (for its private heap).

So if both of the above are running concurrently, there is only ~10k RAM left, but it does work, but when TLS is doing its handshake/negotiation (which on a 168MHz 32F417 takes 2-3 seconds) the HTTP server temporarily hangs.

Investigating this, it appears that LWIP is running out of buffers during TLS and is rejecting incoming packets.

I don't really want to change the CPU to the next one up which has another 64k RAM, because a) I have stock of the 417 and this took about a year to get, b) the design is rock solid and I don't want to tempt fate (there is a lot of subtle hardware usage e.g. DAC ADC DMA timers) even though in theory it should be just alternate function pin changes, c) some versions of the product may not need TLS at all.

I have an option of an 8 megabyte SPI-attached RAM https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/lyontek-ly68l6400-8-megabyte-... which does work and is not bad at $3 (there are cheaper 128kbyte versions too), but obviously cannot be addressed as normal RAM. The ESP32 can do that but the 32F4 can't.

Does anyone know enough about the internals of MbedTLS, or even LWIP, to know whether the memory usage structure lends itself to this kind of "overlay" memory? One can read or write say 1k bytes in 400us, in my target (21MHz SPI with DMA). Obviously this would be horribly inefficient for a byte at a time emulation but perhaps one can switch buffers in and out...

Thank you in advance. If somebody knows of a concrete route, I am happy to pay for the time.

Regards,

Peter