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Operating Systems: Virtualization, Concurrency & Persistence

Assumptions

Explore the fundamental assumptions in user-level memory allocators that manage heap space using malloc and free. Understand how free space is tracked with free lists, the focus on external fragmentation, and the challenges posed by non-relocatable memory regions in allocation and deallocation.

We'll cover the following...

Most of this discussion will focus on the great history of allocators found in user-level memory-allocation libraries. We draw on Wilson’s excellent survey“Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review” by Paul R. Wilson, Mark S. Johnstone, Michael Neely, David Boles. International Workshop on Memory Management, Scotland, UK, September 1995. An excellent and far-reaching survey of many facets of memory allocation. Far too much detail to go into in this tiny chapter! but encourage interested readers to go to the source document itself for more detailsIt is nearly 80 pages long; thus, you really have to be interested!.

Basic interface is provided by malloc() and free()

We assume a basic interface such as ...