Adaptive mesh re nement (AMR) is a very important scienti c application. Several libraries implementing speci c distribution policies havebeen written for AMR. In this paper, we present a \fully general block distribution" which subsumes these distributions, and discuss compiler and run-time tools for supporting these distributions e ciently in the context of a restructuring compiler. We also present performance numbers which suggest that in comparison with library code written for a particular distribution policy, the overhead arising from the generality of our approach is small.