Introduction to Free Space Management
Explore the principles of free space management within memory systems, focusing on the challenges of handling variable-sized blocks and minimizing external fragmentation. Understand different allocation strategies and their trade-offs to effectively manage free memory in both operating systems and user-level memory allocators.
We'll cover the following...
We'll cover the following...
In this chapter, we take a small detour from our discussion of virtualizing memory to discuss a fundamental aspect of any memory management system, whether it be a malloc library (managing pages of a process’s heap) or the OS itself (managing portions of the address space of a process). Specifically, we will discuss the issues surrounding free-space management.
Let us make the problem ...