Allocator Designs
This post explains how to implement heap allocators from scratch. It presents and discusses different allocator designs, including bump allocation, linked list allocation, and fixed-size block allocation. For each of the three designs, we will create a basic implementation that can be used for our kernel.
This blog is openly developed on GitHub. If you have any problems or questions, please open an issue there. You can also leave comments at the bottom. The complete source code for this post can be found in the post-11 branch.
Table of Contents
🔗Introduction
🔗Design Goals
🔗Bump Allocator
🔗Idea
🔗Implementation
🔗GlobalAlloc and Mutability
🔗A Locked Wrapper Type
🔗Implementation for Locked<BumpAllocator>
🔗Address Alignment
🔗Discussion
🔗The Drawback of a Bump Allocator
🔗Summary
🔗What's next?
With this post, we conclude our memory management implementation for now. Next, we will start exploring multitasking, starting with threads. In subsequent post we will then explore multiprocessing, processes, and cooperative multitasking in the form of async/await.