On Sat, 21 Apr 2001, dean gaudet wrote:
> can you give a short description of this allocator?
FirstBill wrote the beginnings of it. It's basically a drop-in
replacement for malloc/calloc/free (really a wrapper around them) that,
when initialized, pre-allocates blocks of various sizes (in FirstBill's,
IIRC, it does as many blocks of a given power-of-two size as will fit in
8KB).
It uses a simple stack to keep its free lists. The stack, while simple in
concept, is the tricky-in-implementation part. The idea is that the stack
API just has three operations: init/push/pop. That's it. On many
platforms, a stack like this can be implemented without locks, using
architecture-specific instructions like Compare-Double-and-Swap.
So it's really just a wrapper around malloc that keeps stacks of blocks
that can be very efficiently re-allocated.
That's it.
--Cliff
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Cliff Woolley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Charlottesville, VA
