dimonomid / umm_malloc

a memory allocator for embedded systems (microcontrollers)

A memory allocator for embedded systems (microcontrollers)

NOTE: this repository was created before the original author created his own one, so now, please, see the original repo by Ralph Hempel.

All improvements which I've done are already pulled there.

---

This is a memory management library specifically designed to work with the
ARM7 embedded processor, but it should work on many other 32 bit processors, as well as 16 and 8 bit devices.

Initially I've found this great memory allocator here: http://hempeldesigngroup.com/embedded/stories/memorymanager/ , fixed little configuration issues, and uploaded to the github.

I successfully tested it on Microchip PIC32 device, and it is extremely effective comparing to default memory allocator provided by Microchip.

I was seriously beaten by fragmentation with default allocator: my project often allocates blocks of various size, from several bytes to several hundreds of bytes, and sometimes I faced 'out of memory' error. My project has total 8192 bytes of heap, at the particular moment there is more than 5K of free memory, but default allocator has maximum non-fragmented memory block just of about 700 bytes, because of fragmentation. This is too bad, so I decided to look for more efficient solution.

When I tried this memory allocator, in exactly the same situation it has more than 3800 bytes block! It was so unbelievable to be, and I performed hard test: device worked heavily more than 30 hours. No memory leaks, everything works as it should work.

I also found this allocator in the FreeRTOS repository: http://svnmios.midibox.org/listing.php?repname=svn.mios32&path=%2Ftrunk%2FFreeRTOS%2FSource%2Fportable%2FMemMang%2F&rev=1041&peg=1041# , and this fact is an additional evidence of stability of umm_malloc.

So I completely switched to umm_malloc, and I'm quite happy with it.

Acknowledgements

Joerg Wunsch and the avr-libc provided the first malloc() implementation
that I examined in detail.

http://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc

Doug Lea's paper on malloc() was another excellent reference and provides
a lot of detail on advanced memory management techniques such as binning.

http://g.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html

Bill Dittman provided excellent suggestions, including macros to support
using these functions in critical sections, and for optimizing realloc()
further by checking to see if the previous block was free and could be
used for the new block size. This can help to reduce heap fragmentation
significantly.

Yaniv Ankin suggested that a way to dump the current heap condition
might be useful. I combined this with an idea from plarroy to also
allow checking a free pointer to make sure it's valid.

---

The memory manager assumes the following things:

1. The standard POSIX compliant malloc/realloc/free semantics are used
2. All memory used by the manager is allocated at link time, it is aligned on a 32 bit boundary, it is contiguous, and its extent (start and end
   address) is filled in by the linker.
3. All memory used by the manager is initialized to 0 as part of the
   runtime startup routine. No other initialization is required.

The fastest linked list implementations use doubly linked lists so that
its possible to insert and delete blocks in constant time. This memory
manager keeps track of both free and used blocks in a doubly linked list.

Most memory managers use some kind of list structure made up of pointers
to keep track of used - and sometimes free - blocks of memory. In an
embedded system, this can get pretty expensive as each pointer can use
up to 32 bits.

In most embedded systems there is no need for managing large blocks
of memory dynamically, so a full 32 bit pointer based data structure
for the free and used block lists is wasteful. A block of memory on
the free list would use 16 bytes just for the pointers!

This memory management library sees the malloc heap as an array of blocks, and uses block numbers to keep track of locations. The block numbers are
15 bits - which allows for up to 32767 blocks of memory. The high order
bit marks a block as being either free or in use, which will be explained
later.

The result is that a block of memory on the free list uses just 8 bytes
instead of 16.

In fact, we go even one step futher when we realize that the free block
index values are available to store data when the block is allocated.

The overhead of an allocated block is therefore just 4 bytes.

Each memory block holds 8 bytes, and there are up to 32767 blocks
available, for about 256K of heap space. If that's not enough, you
can always add more data bytes to the body of the memory block
at the expense of free block size overhead.

Detailed explanation of algorithms can be found in umm_malloc.c file.

Usage

• Clone repository umm_malloc somewhere (or just download zip file and unpack it)
• Add umm_malloc.c file to your project
• Edit umm_malloc_cfg.h file depending on your needs (if you haven't defined UMM_REDEFINE_MEM_FUNCTIONS macro, make sure you use umm_malloc() and umm_free() functions in your project, instead of standard malloc() and free() functions)

umm_malloc's Issues

A problem while free

Hi, I have a question about free.
In line 377 in umm_malloc.c.
According to the chart, after assimilated, block c lost the pointer nf pf, so it not in the free list.
It really does not matter?

Thanks for promoting umm_malloc

I am the original author of umm_malloc, and for fun I did a search on where it was being used and came upon your site. Thanks for the kind words and support of the library, I have not really touched it in years but it's good to know it's helping someone.
I have now created a GitHub repo of my own for this project, and would like to pull your changes (and give you credit of course) if that's OK with you.
Also, I plan on changing the test suite so that it uses a more standard testing framework - these things were not as popular years ago :-)

pointer of type 'void *' used in subtraction

Hi Dmitry,

Is there a way to get around the following error (without suppressing warnings in the compiler)?

CC app/umm_malloc.c
app/umm_malloc.c: In function 'umm_free':
app/umm_malloc.c:799:12: error: pointer of type 'void *' used in subtraction [-Werror=pointer-arith]
    c = (ptr-(void *)(&(umm_heap[0])))/sizeof(umm_block);
            ^
app/umm_malloc.c: In function 'umm_realloc':
app/umm_malloc.c:1035:12: error: pointer of type 'void *' used in subtraction [-Werror=pointer-arith]
    c = (ptr-(void *)(&(umm_heap[0])))/sizeof(umm_block);
            ^
cc1: all warnings being treated as errors
make: *** [out/build/app/umm_malloc.o] Error 1

Thanks,
John