Malloc(3) revisited

Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.org>

malloc (3) is one of the oldest parts of the C language environment and not surprisingly the world has changed a bit since it was first conceived. The fact that most UNIX kernels have changed from swap/segment to virtual memory/page based memory management has not been sufficiently reflected in the implementations of the malloc/free API. A new implementation was designed, written, tested and bench-marked with an eye on the workings and performance characteristics of modern Virtual Memory systems. It works OK.