muchen 牧辰

Week 4

Updated 2022-02-01

What happens in memory when we run a program and where does the varaibles and data go?

Stack and Heap

For each program, there is the same address range in the address space. and layout for each program – this is possible using virtual memory (later in course).

We already knows about the stack, and we know stack grows down (in memory addresses in the address space). The stack holds the call frames and its local variables.

CleanShot 2022-02-01 at 14.18.54@2x

But there are some more initialization stuff at the end of the address space. When a program gets loaded from disk, this is what is allocated.

For other storage, they’re placed on the heap, which starts at the end (before .bss) and it grows back up.

CleanShot 2022-02-01 at 14.19.44@2x

Typically the address space is large enough such that the heap and the stack don’t collide. There are other protections to keep it from happening – such as a stack allocation limit.


Unlike stacks, things allocated on the heap survives function calls, but things allocated on the heap must be allocated and managed more deliberately.

Managing Allocation

In C, we do manual allocation using malloc and free functions.

Heap Allocation Constraints

Before we look at how allocate/free mechanisms work, we have to consider things to make memory highly utilized:

We also want fast allocation of memory, so we also need to consider:

😭 Unfortunately, it’s very hard to get both high utilization and low overhead.

Simple Allocator

Let’s build a naive heap allocator based on how the stack allocates, recall allocating on the stack:

The stack allocator is nice because it’s easy to manage and easy to implement.

However, to understand why this is “naive”, let’s go through an example. In this example, we will allocate and free addresses in this sequence:

allocate A
allocate B
allocate C
allocate D
allocate E
free C
allocate F
free E
free B
allocate G
allocate H ⚠️

Suppose that after we allocate G, our physical memory for the heap has been completely used up:

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 20.55.01@2x

The empty spaces between A, D, and F are from freeing the addresses B, C, and E. Despite the low occupancy, because of how our naive allocator is designed (to push new allocations to the end), we cannot allocate H beacuse there is no more free space at the end.

This phenomenom is called fragmentation since allocated areas are fragmented. We can improve utilization by reducing fragmentation, but to do so we need to:

Tracking Allocation Size

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.02.59@2x

An easy to do is to put such metadata — including the size — as a header in the allocated block — along with the actual allocated data.

These information can be compacted into this layout:

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.28.52@2x

Where sz is the size of the allocated block, and a is a bit indicating if this is allocated or not.

Tracking Free Space

We want to track where and how much free space there is in the heap.

Implicit Free List

One thing we might do is to list all of allocated AND unallocated blocks by size. Once we know the size, we can implicitly determine where the free locations are.

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.09.14@2x

While this is ssimple, we have to look throught the entire heap to find where free spaces are 😔.

Explicit Free List

Since no program/user is using the unallocated space anyway, we can put a pointer there that points to the next free block. Then we have a linked-list that chains all the free spaces together.

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.10.58@2x

In this example, FL is a pointer to the next free block.

While this is explicit, freeing memory is more complicated since now we have pointers pointing back and forth — and a more complicated operation is required if we want to merge two adjascent free blocks.

Finding Free Space

First Fit

Of course, the simplest way to find free space is to start from the start of the heap and find the next free block that is big enough for allocation.

Next Fit

Instead of starting at the beginning of the heap, start at where last allocation occured. Since we can assume (most of the time) if there were a free block it would’ve been taken during previous allocation.

Best™ Fit — Minimizes Wasted Space

There are many implemenations that uses tables to track. But allocation time is longer due to look up.

Block Splitting

Once we have a free block, we need to split the free block to accomendate just for the allocation size.

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.43.18@2x

Freeing Memory

Freeing a block seems straightforward: simply find the block address via pointers, then set the allocation flag (a bit) to false – which makes the block as free space available for future allocations.

The problem is that creates fragmentation:

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.50.05@2x

For example if we were to now free the size 2 block from previous section, notice that instead of having one free space of size 6, we have two free space, sized 2 and 4 respectively.

Coalescing Deallocated Blocks

We need to coalesce these free blocks during deallocation to mitigate fragmentation:

What if the previous block was free? Given this example:

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.54.48@2x

Using our previous method won’t work and will still create fragmentation. We also can’t trivially check previous block since we don’t know where the header is for previous block – thus we cannot find the size.

To fix this, we use boundary tags – which is a bidirectional implicit list that also links to previous blocks. Our new layout for a block is:

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.57.23@2x

Where second set of sz and a is for the reverse direction. This ultimately allows us to have bidirectional traversal in the heap.

CleanShot 2022-02-27 at 21.58.20@2x