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 language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 245-255 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | SIGPLAN Notices (ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages) |
Volume | 38 |
Issue number | 2 SUPPL. |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 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