Dynamic memory management for programmable devices

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.