[ILUG] thoughts on malloc... Memory Pools ?

[David Golden]

Sounds in some ways a little bit like AmigaOS 3.x memory pooling 

(Amiga memory management, such as it was, wasn't like most other systems, but 
bear with me:)


You asked the OS for a "memory pool" with:

CreatePool(memFlags,puddleSize,threshSize)

then allocated "puddles" from it with very low overhead with

AllocPooled(pool,memSize)

The API documentation is available on the web:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=CreatePool+AllocPooled&start=10&hl=en&selm=2olvbu%24fut%40kraken.itc.gu.edu.au&rnum=19

 (Someone apparently posted the complete v39 Amiga exec.library* autodocs** 
to alt.sys.amiga.demos in 1994 - it makes interesting reading if you want 
insight into "different" OS design.  The Amiga OS had some ideas that were 
good and some that were bad - one thing you seemed to be able to count on was 
bizarre differences to most other OSes )

* effectively the "kernel" of amigaos - no clear kernel/user space 
distinction, though. (no memory protection as we know it, and individual 
functions in shared libraries including exec.library were dynamically 
replaceable with SetFunction() )

** autodocs were like javadocs, but for C.