A hardware implementation of realloc function

摘要

The memory intensitve nature of object-oriented languages such as C＋＋ and Java has created the need of a high-performance dynamic memory management. Objec-oriented applications often generate higher memory intensity in the heap region. Thus, high-performance memory manager is needed to cope with such applications. As today's VLSI technology advances, it becomes more and mroe attractive to map basic software algorithms such as maloc(), free(), and realloc() into hardware. This paper presents a hardware desgin of realloc function that fully utilizes the advantage of combinaional logic. There are two steps needed to complete a reallocation process: (a) try to reallocate on the original memory blocvk and (b) if (a) failed, allocate another memory blck and copy the contents of the original block to this new location. In our scheme, (a) can be done in constant time. For (b), the allocation of new memory block and he deallocaion of original block are done in constant time. The hardware complexity of proposed scheme (i.e. X-unit, RS-unit, and ESG-unit) is O(n), where n represents the size of bit-map.