1. CS703 - Advanced Operating Systems
By Mr. Farhan Zaidi

2. Lecture No. 20

3. Overview of today’s lecture
Goals of a good allocator
Memory Fragmentation
Internal and external
Implementation issues of memory allocators
Knowing how much to free
Tracking free blocks
Implicit list based allocator details

4. Goals of Good malloc/free
Primary goals
Good time performance for malloc and free
Ideally should take constant time (not always possible)
Should certainly not take linear time in the number of blocks
Good space utilization
User allocated structures should be large fraction of the heap.
Want to minimize “fragmentation”.

5. Goals of Good malloc/free ( cont.)
Some other goals
Good locality properties
Structures allocated close in time should be close in space
“Similar” objects should be allocated close in space
Robust
Can check that free(p1) is on a valid allocated object p1
Can check that memory references are to allocated space

6. Internal Fragmentation
Poor memory utilization caused by fragmentation.
Comes in two forms: internal and external fragmentation
Internal fragmentation
For some block, internal fragmentation is the difference between the block size and the payload size.
Caused by overhead of maintaining heap data structures, padding for alignment purposes, or explicit policy decisions (e.g., not to split the block).
Depends only on the pattern of previous requests, and thus is easy to measure.
block
Internal
fragmentation
Internal
fragmentation
payload

7. External Fragmentation
Occurs when there is enough aggregate heap memory, but no single
free block is large enough
p1 = malloc(4)
p2 = malloc(5)
p3 = malloc(6)
free(p2)
p4 = malloc(6)
oops!
External fragmentation depends on the pattern of future requests, and
thus is difficult to measure.

8. Impossible to “solve” fragmentation
If you read allocation papers or books to find the best allocator(!?!?!) it can be frustrating:
all discussions revolve around tradeoffs
the reason? There cannot be a best allocator
Theoretical result:
for any possible allocation algorithm, there exist streams of allocation and deallocation requests that defeat the allocator and force it into severe fragmentation.
“pretty well” = ~20% fragmentation under many workloads

9. p1 = malloc(1) p0
free(p0)

10. Knowing How Much to Free
Standard method
Keep the length of a block in the word preceding the block.
This word is often called the header field or header
free(p0)
p0 = malloc(4) p0
Block size
data 5

11. Keeping Track of Free Blocks
Method 1: Implicit list using lengths -- links all blocks
Method 2: Explicit list among the free blocks using pointers within the free blocks
Method 3: Segregated free list
Different free lists for different size classes
Method 4: Blocks sorted by size
Can use a balanced tree (e.g. Red-Black tree) with pointers within each free block, and the length used as a key 5 4 2 6 5 4 2 6

12. Method 1: Implicit List
Need to identify whether each block is free or allocated
1 word
a = 1: allocated block
a = 0: free block
size: block size
payload: application data
(allocated blocks only)
size a
payload
Format of
allocated and
free blocks
optional
padding

13. Implicit List: Finding a Free Block
First fit:
Search list from beginning, choose first free block that fits
Next fit:
Like first-fit, but search list from location of end of previous search
Best fit:
Search the list, choose the free block with the closest size that fits

14. Implicit List: Allocating in Free Block
Allocating in a free block - splitting p 4 2 6
void addblock(ptr p, int len) {
int newsize = ((len + 1) >> 1) << 1; // add 1 and round up
int oldsize = *p & -2; // mask out low bit
*p = newsize | 1; // set new length
if (newsize < oldsize)
*(p+newsize) = oldsize - newsize; // set length in remaining
} // part of block 4 2
addblock(p, 4)

15. Implicit List: Freeing a Block
Simplest implementation:
Only need to clear allocated flag
void free_block(ptr p) { *p = *p & -2} 4 4 4 2 2 p
free(p) 4 4 4 2 2
malloc(5)
Oops!

16. Implicit List: Coalescing
Join (coelesce) with next and/or previous block if they are free
Coalescing with next block
void free_block(ptr p) { *p = *p & -2; // clear allocated flag next = p + *p; // find next block if ((*next & 1) == 0) *p = *p + *next; // add to this block if } // not allocated 4 4 4 2 2 p
free(p) 4 4 6 2

17. Implicit List: Bidirectional Coalescing
Boundary tags [Knuth73]
Replicate size/allocated word at bottom of free blocks
Allows us to traverse the “list” backwards, but requires extra space 4 6