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Home > Archive > Unix Programming > December 2006 > malloc implementation
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malloc implementation
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| Rob Hoelz 2006-12-18, 7:22 pm |
| Hello,
I've been curious about the implementation of malloc lately. I have an
idea about how the allocator keeps track of free space vs used space,
but how are the size and start of the data segment discovered?
Thanks!
--
-Rob Hoelz
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| matevzb 2006-12-18, 7:22 pm |
| On Dec 18, 9:11 pm, Rob Hoelz <h...@wisc.edu> wrote:
> I've been curious about the implementation of malloc lately. I have an
> idea about how the allocator keeps track of free space vs used space,
> but how are the size and start of the data segment discovered?
A commonly used implementation is at
http://g.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html along with algorithm
explanation. A word of warning though, the source is a whopping 175 K
in size =)
--
WYCIWYG - what you C is what you get
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| William Ahern 2006-12-18, 7:22 pm |
| On Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:11:12 -0600, Rob Hoelz wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been curious about the implementation of malloc lately. I have an
> idea about how the allocator keeps track of free space vs used space,
> but how are the size and start of the data segment discovered?
>
> Thanks!
Read the man pages for end(), brk(), and sbrk() for the traditional
approach.
A common, more recent strategy is simply for the allocator to use anonymous
mmap() regions. In this case, the allocator knows the length, but the start
of the region is determined entirely by the kernel and returned by the
mmap() call upon each invocation.
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