Based on Jeff Bonwick's paper The Slab Allocator: An Object-Caching Kernel Memory Allocator [pdf]
I have been interested to write a memory allocator for some time and finally thought of writing the Slab Allocator as first introduced in the above paper by Jeff Bonwick. This is my basic attempt to implementing some of the very interesting ideas presented in the paper such as object caching for learning purpose. The allocator is written in the userspace for the userspace programs that has to frequently allocate and free many objects of same type.
Features that are yet to be worked on which I will be writing over the next few weeks:
- Slab coloring
- Large object optimization and small object validations
- Memory reclamation
There definitely are things that might not fully work well which I might not even be aware of. There might also be things that could have been done in a better way.
A cache represents a collection of contiguous, page aligned memory blocks.
Each of these page aligned blocks is called a slab.
Detail documentation regarding the implementation, uses, and architecture will be added soon. If you are curious, check out the original paper as this project tries to implement many of the techniques described there.
To be added soon.