Dynamic memory management for programmable devices

Sanjeev Kumar, Kai Li

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The paper presents the design and implementation of a novel dynamic memory-management scheme for ESP - a language for programmable devices. The firmware for programmable devices has to be fast and reliable. To support high performance, ESP provides an explicit memory-management interface that can be implemented efficiently. To ensure reliability, ESP uses a model checker to verify memory safety. The VMMC firmware is used as a case study to evaluate the effectiveness of this memory-management scheme. We find that the Spin model checker is able to exhaustively verify memory safety of the firmware; the largest process took 67.6 seconds and used 34.45 Mbytes of memory to verify. We also find that the runtime overhead to maintain the reference counts is small; the additional overhead accounts for 7.35% of the total message processing cost (in the worst case) over a malloc/free interface.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)245-255
Number of pages11
JournalSIGPLAN Notices (ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages)
Volume38
Issue number2 SUPPL.
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2003

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

Keywords

  • Dynamic memory management
  • Model checking
  • Programmable devices
  • Reference counting

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