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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.
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 application can allocate, access and free memory through the following interface: Allocate memory from the pools. The function will determine the pool where the required block fits in. If all blocks of that pool are already reserved, the function tries to find one in the next bigger pool(s). An allocated memory block is represented with a ...
dlmalloc is a boundary tag allocator. Memory on the heap is allocated as "chunks", an 8-byte aligned data structure which contains a header, and usable memory. Allocated memory contains an 8- or 16-byte overhead for the size of the chunk and usage flags (similar to a dope vector). Unallocated chunks also store pointers to other free chunks in ...
Each allocated memory block is given a master descriptor with the properties of the block — physical address, size, and whether it is present in main memory or not, in which case on first access the block must be allocated, or if there is an address, it is an address on secondary storage and must be loaded to main memory.
Another common use of pointers is to point to dynamically allocated memory from malloc which returns a consecutive block of memory of no less than the requested size that can be used as an array. While most operators on arrays and pointers are equivalent, the result of the sizeof operator differs.
A free list (or freelist) is a data structure used in a scheme for dynamic memory allocation. It operates by connecting unallocated regions of memory together in a linked list, using the first word of each unallocated region as a pointer to the next. It is most suitable for allocating from a memory pool, where all objects have the same size.
This technique is used for retaining allocated memory containing a data object of a certain type for reuse upon subsequent allocations of objects of the same type. It is analogous to an object pool, but only applies to memory, not other resources. Slab allocation was first introduced in the Solaris 2.4 kernel by Jeff Bonwick. [1]