A Compacting Real-Time Memory Management System

We propose a real real-time memory management system called Compact-fit that offers both time and space predictability. Compact-fit is a compacting memory management system for allocating, deallocating, and accessing memory in real time. The system provides predictable memory fragmentation and response times that are constant or linear in the size of the request, independently of the global memory state. We present two Compact-fit implementations and compare them to established memory management systems, which all fail to provide predictable memory fragmentation. The experiments confirm our theoretical complexity bounds and demonstrate competitive performance. In addition, we can control the performance versus fragmentation tradeoff via our concept of partial compaction. The system can be parameterized with the needed level of compaction, improving the performance while keeping memory fragmentation predictable.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: USENIX
• Authors: Silviu S. Craciunas, Christoph M. Kirsch, Hannes Payer, Ana Sokolova, Horst Stadler, Robert Staudinger
• Keywords: Memory Fragmentation, Memory Management, Operating System, Predictable Memory Fragmentation, USENIX 2008