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Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of resource management applied to computer memory.The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed.
This diagram represents five contiguous memory regions which each hold a pointer and a data block. The List Head points to the 2nd element, which points to the 5th, which points to the 3rd, thereby forming a linked list of available memory regions. A free list (or freelist) is a data structure used in a scheme for dynamic memory allocation.
Therefore, stack based allocation is suitable for temporary data or data which is no longer required after the current function exits. A thread's assigned stack size can be as small as only a few bytes on some small CPUs. Allocating more memory on the stack than is available can result in a crash due to stack overflow.
With virtual memory, a contiguous range of virtual addresses can be mapped to several non-contiguous blocks of physical memory; this non-contiguous allocation is one of the benefits of paging. [8] [3] However, paged mapping causes another problem, internal fragmentation. This occurs when a program requests a block of memory that does not ...
In operating systems, memory management is the function responsible for managing the computer's primary memory. [1]: 105–208 The memory management function keeps track of the status of each memory location, either allocated or free. It determines how memory is allocated among competing processes, deciding which gets memory, when they receive ...
The buddy memory allocation technique is a memory allocation algorithm that divides memory into partitions to try to satisfy a memory request as suitably as possible. This system makes use of splitting memory into halves to try to give a best fit.
In a computer using virtual memory, accessing the location corresponding to a memory address may involve many levels. In computing, a memory address is a reference to a specific memory location in memory used by both software and hardware. [1] These addresses are fixed-length sequences of digits, typically displayed and handled as unsigned ...
Memory architecture describes the methods used to implement electronic computer data storage in a manner that is a combination of the fastest, most reliable, most durable, and least expensive way to store and retrieve information. Depending on the specific application, a compromise of one of these requirements may be necessary in order to ...