Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory – Storage accessing and control – Memory configuring
Reexamination Certificate
1998-08-11
2001-04-17
Robertson, David L. (Department: 2759)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory
Storage accessing and control
Memory configuring
Reexamination Certificate
active
06219772
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to efficient small block memory allocation for computer programs.
2. Description of Related Art
Operating systems provide functions that are used by application programs for the allocation and de-allocation of memory. Typically, an application program reserves a region of virtual memory that it commits as necessary to store data structures and their actual contents. If the data structures are dynamic and continue to grow in size, the application program can commit additional memory from the reserved region.
These functions must be generalized in such a way that they provide the best performance for a wide variety of application programs. As a result, the functions are not optimized to provide the best performance, for example, for requests to allocate small blocks of memory. Thus, there is a need in the art for improved techniques for the allocation and de-allocation of memory, especially when the requested blocks are small.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
To overcome the limitations in the prior art described above, and to overcome other limitations that will become apparent upon reading and understanding the present specification, the present invention discloses a method, apparatus and article of manufacture for efficient small block memory allocation. One or more segments are allocated in the memory, wherein each segment is comprised of a plurality of data pages. A same size pool is created for a specified block size and one or more of the data pages are assigned to the same size pool, wherein each assigned data page is subdivided into a plurality of free blocks of the specified block size. A request for memory of the specified block size is satisfied by accessing the data page assigned to the same size pool and allocating one or more of the free blocks of the data page to the request.
REFERENCES:
patent: 5420999 (1995-05-01), Mundy
patent: 5561785 (1996-10-01), Blandy et al.
Augustine, Jr. Davis Cooper
Gadangi Ashok Kumar
Saathoff Kirk Ray
Autodesk, Inc.
Gates & Cooper LLP
Robertson David L.
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