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Linux Memory Management

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LinuxMM:
  • MemoryManagementLinks

Memory management is a specialist subject, meaning there aren't a lot of links to memory management sites and it is hard to find information, even with Google. Because of this, some links to interesting memory management information have been gathered on this page. If you find information that should be here, please don't hesitate to create yourself an account and edit this page.

Memory management hardware

The Fundamentals Of Cache A nice read on the memory hierarchy and CPU caches.

Kernel space memory management

Bonwick's classical paper on the Slab Allocator. Design overview of the SunOS 5.4 Object-Caching Kernel Memory Allocator, updated in Magazines and Vmem: Extending the Slab Allocator to Many CPUs and Arbitrary Resources. Linux uses a modified version of this, as you can see: mm/slab.c.

Proceedings of the 2000 Atlanta Linux Showcase & Conference, including:

  • The Elements of Cache Programming Style

  • Dynamic Buffer Cache Management Scheme based on Simple and Aggressive Prefetching

  • Linux Kernel Hash Table Behavior: Analysis and Improvements

Matt Dillon's excellent Design Elements of the FreeBSD VM System tells you everything you want to know about FreeBSD's VM subsystem.

Chuck Cranor's The UVM Virtual Memory System, which tells you most of what you want to know about the NetBSD and OpenBSD virtual memory systems. This is an interesting read together with Matt Dillon's FreeBSD paper, since UVM takes a different aproach to some of the same problems.

Siteseer's OS Memory Management listing.

Solaris page cache management.

SunOS Virtual Memory Implementation (postscript) A paper describing the structure of the SunOS memory management subsystem.

The Memory Manager in Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista

CNE's Virtual Memory Tutorial a great introduction to what virtual memory is, how it works and what a virtual memory management subsystem needs to do.

Wikipedia entry on page replacement algorithms.

User space memory management

The Memory Management Reference lots of resources, mostly about userland memory management.

DLmalloc is a malloc library that uses mmap() for memory allocations above a predefined threshold (1 MB per default), that way your program can use up to 3 GB of malloc()ed memory, even though the kernel only supports brk() up to 910 MB. Update: note that glibc has this functionality built-in for quite a few years now. (RikvanRiel, dec 2004)

Researchers and Developers

  • Scott Kaplan, Amherst College

  • Xiaodong Zhang, College of William & Mary.

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