Architectural Support for Dynamic Memory Management

Recent advances in software engineering, such as graphical user intevaces and object-oriented programming, have caused applications to become more memory intensive. These applications tend to allocate dynamic memory prolipcally. Moreove< automatic dynamic memory reclamation (garbagecollection, GC)has become a popular feature in modern programming languages. As a result, the time consumed by dynamic storage management can be up to one-third of the program execution time. This illustrates the need for a high-performance memory management scheme. This paper presents a top-level design and evaluation of the proposed instruction extensions to facilitate heap management. These instructions are h-malloc for memory allocation, mark, and sweep for garbage collection. Simulation results show that the hit ratio for 2 Kbits and 8 Kbits buffer range from 84-99% and 95-99%, respectively. The hardware complexiv of the proposed scheme is O(n), where n is the size of the bit-vector: For a design wi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: J. Morris Chang, Witawas Srisa-an, Chia-Tien Dan Lo
• Keywords: Dynamic Memory Reclamation, Hardware, ICCD 2000, Memory Allocation, Memory Management Scheme