Simulation of high-performance memory allocators

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Risco-Martín, José L., Colmenar, J. Manuel, Atienza, David, Hidalgo, J. Ignacio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929395551174656
author Risco-Martín, José L.
Colmenar, J. Manuel
Atienza, David
Hidalgo, J. Ignacio
author_facet Risco-Martín, José L.
Colmenar, J. Manuel
Atienza, David
Hidalgo, J. Ignacio
contents For the last thirty years, a large variety of memory allocators have been proposed. Since performance, memory usage and energy consumption of each memory allocator differs, software engineers often face difficult choices in selecting the most suitable approach for their applications. To this end, custom allocators are developed from scratch, which is a difficult and error-prone process. This issue has special impact in the field of portable consumer embedded systems, that must execute a limited amount of multimedia applications, demanding high performance and extensive memory usage at a low energy consumption. This paper presents a flexible and efficient simulator to study Dynamic Memory Managers (DMMs), a composition of one or more memory allocators. This novel approach allows programmers to simulate custom and general DMMs, which can be composed without incurring any additional runtime overhead or additional programming cost. We show that this infrastructure simplifies DMM construction, mainly because the target application does not need to be compiled every time a new DMM must be evaluated and because we propose a structured method to search and build DMMs in an object-oriented fashion. Within a search procedure, the system designer can choose the "best" allocator by simulation for a particular target application and embedded system. In our evaluation, we show that our scheme delivers better performance, less memory usage and less energy consumption than single memory allocators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_15776
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simulation of high-performance memory allocators
Risco-Martín, José L.
Colmenar, J. Manuel
Atienza, David
Hidalgo, J. Ignacio
Operating Systems
For the last thirty years, a large variety of memory allocators have been proposed. Since performance, memory usage and energy consumption of each memory allocator differs, software engineers often face difficult choices in selecting the most suitable approach for their applications. To this end, custom allocators are developed from scratch, which is a difficult and error-prone process. This issue has special impact in the field of portable consumer embedded systems, that must execute a limited amount of multimedia applications, demanding high performance and extensive memory usage at a low energy consumption. This paper presents a flexible and efficient simulator to study Dynamic Memory Managers (DMMs), a composition of one or more memory allocators. This novel approach allows programmers to simulate custom and general DMMs, which can be composed without incurring any additional runtime overhead or additional programming cost. We show that this infrastructure simplifies DMM construction, mainly because the target application does not need to be compiled every time a new DMM must be evaluated and because we propose a structured method to search and build DMMs in an object-oriented fashion. Within a search procedure, the system designer can choose the "best" allocator by simulation for a particular target application and embedded system. In our evaluation, we show that our scheme delivers better performance, less memory usage and less energy consumption than single memory allocators.
title Simulation of high-performance memory allocators
topic Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15776