Slab Memory Allocator

Contents

• Introduction
• Usage
• User API reference
  • Slab cache initialization
  • Memory allocation
  • Debugging
• Examples
  • Simple heap memory management
  • Dynamic grow-only heap management

Introduction

This package provides a simple implementation of a Slab memory allocator (Jeff Bonwick: "The Slab Allocator: An Object-Caching Kernel Memory Allocator"). A Slab cache is a very efficient method to manage equally sized memory objects.

The current implementation has some limitations:

• The maximum object size is 4064 byte (one page minus 32 byte header). However, with large objects it is more likely that a significant amount of memory is wasted unused since objects must fit completely in a slab page (e.g. with an object size of 1024 byte each page can only hold 3 objects leaving 992 bytes unused). Slab caches work best for small objects.
• No synchronization is done. If a slab cache is used concurrently, the application must provide sufficient synchronization.

Usage

To use the slab memory allocator you need to include <l4/slab/slab.h> and link libslab to your binaries.