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

[http://www.systemlogic.net/articles/00/10/cache/ The Fundamentals Of Cache] A nice read on the memory hierarchy and CPU caches.

Kernel space memory management

Bonwick's classical paper on the [http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/bos94/bonwick.html Slab Allocator] Design overview of the SunOS 5.4 Object-Caching Kernel Memory Allocator. Linux uses a modified version of this, as you can see: [http://lxr.linux.no/source/mm/slab.c mm/slab.c].

Proceedings of the [http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als2000 2000 Atlanta Linux Showcase & Conference], including:

• [http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als00/2000papers/papers/sears.html The Elements of Cache Programming Style]

• [http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als00/2000papers/papers/jeon.html Dynamic Buffer Cache Management Scheme based on Simple and Aggressive Prefetching]

• [http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als00/2000papers/papers/lever.html Linux Kernel Hash Table Behavior: Analysis and Improvements]

Matt Dillon's excellent [http://www.daemonnews.org/200001/freebsd_vm.html Design Elements of the FreeBSD VM System] tells you everything you want to know about FreeBSD's VM subsystem.

Chuck Cranor's [http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/pub/chuck/tech/uvm/ 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 [http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/OperatingSystems/MemoryManagement/ OS Memory Management] listing.

Solaris [http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/priority_paging.html priority paging] which, as I understand it, has been disabled by default in newer versions of Solaris.

[http://www.sun.com/smcc/solaris-migration/docs/postscript/vm-impl.ps SunOS Virtual Memory Implementation] (postscript) A paper describing the structure of the SunOS memory management subsystem.

CNE's [http://cne.gmu.edu/modules/vm/ 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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_replacement_algorithms page replacement algorithms].

User space memory management

[http://www.memorymanagement.org/ The Memory Management Reference] lots of resources, mostly about userland memory management.

[http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html 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

• [http://www.cs.amherst.edu/~sfkaplan/ Scott Kaplan], Amherst College

• [http://www.cs.wm.edu/~zhang/ Xiaodong Zhang], College of William & Mary.